Former presidential press secretary Larry Speakes' confession that he manufactured a quote for President Reagan at the November 1987 summit in Geneva, Switzerland, created a firestorm which cost Speakes dearly, raised serious problems about the ethics of public relations practitioners, and contained broad implications for the profession. A study examined: the contrast between the ethical practices of journalists and public relations practitioners in terms of their perceptions of "truth" and "confidentiality"; the conflicting theories on measurement of public relations effectiveness on the premise that "you achieve what you seek to measure"; and the implications of the Speakes controversy for public relations ethics. Information packets on the Speakes controversy and on public relations measurement and evaluation were obtained from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Information Center. These items were contrasted with several papers on measurement presented at research sessions for either the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Public Relations Division or the PRSA Educators Section. The findings suggest that (1) if PRSA had practiced cognitive consistency--taking into consideration existing beliefs--it would have emphasized the "loyalty" items in its Code to condemn Speakes' actions rather than its "truth" items; and (2) both Speakes and PRSA may have been led to take self-defeating actions because they were thinking of short-term, narrowly focused benefits rather than of the larger picture. (Thirty-four references are listed. (MS)