Recent reports of sophisticated public relations attacks on current affairs programmes, such as Panorama and Dispatches, will inevitably lead to questions within the PR industry about the morality of such practices by the agencies behind them.

So what exactly has been going on?

According to a report in The Guardian, companies and public sector bodies that have come under the spotlight of undercover documentaries have been increasingly turning to PR agencies to orchestrate campaigns to discredit the findings of their investigations.

In response to negative TV coverage, these agencies use a variety of PR tactics to counter the claims made by these programmes.

They range from so-called Twitter bombing, the process of bombarding the site with messages bad-mouthing the programmes, to concerted campaigns of phoney complaints to industry regulators such as Ofcom.

One such high-profile example was a stage-managed demonstration outside Channel 4’s head office in June shortly after the station broadcast Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, a TV investigation into alleged war crimes during the country’s bloody civil war.

The demonstration was widely believed to be a PR exercise on behalf of the Sri Lankan ministry of defence.

This string of smear campaigns clearly emphasises a dilemma that many public relations practitioners face when dealing with requests from clients that could transport them into the murky realms of unethical PR.

On the one hand, business is business and simply following a questionable brief is no different from a lawyer’s duty to represent a defendant the best they can no matter how serious the crime.

But on the other hand, using dirty and dubious tactics in this way can do untold damage to the perception of public relations by undermining the very credibility of the practice as a whole.