Crisis Communications – How to Create a Crisis: Respond badly to the bait
Posted by sparkprmarketing on October 21, 2009
Consistently, applied communications studies have shown us that the way to inoculate against hostile audiences is to engage them, not ignore them. We also know that if hostile audiences are ignored – or even worse, ridiculed – then formerly neutral audiences will start to take the hostile position. This happens at every scale, from small-business internal politics to county commissioner meetings to Congressional “town meetings.”
The Obama administration, since the president’s historic election victory, has been hailed as the most PR-savvy political arm since Andrew Jackson created the modern presidency’s appeal to the “common man” in the 19th century.
So it is with deep concern that PR pros watch the administration stumble in its reaction to the consistent baiting by FOX news channel commentators like Glenn Beck. Media pundits are also worried. The New York Times media business columnist David Carr wrote this morning:
“Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics. While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.”
The administration is mad at FOX. The problem is, it is mad at the commentators, the pundits, the folks who are paid to get into shouting matches and create “info-tainment” for the viewing public. So, White House communications director Anita Dunn has pronounced that there will be no more “access” – no administration representative will be interviewed by FOX news correspondents until the outlet is nicer. Oh, and they also want other media to give reporters who work for FOX a bad time about their choice of employment.
Please. To take a Denver analogy, that’s like the governor refusing to be interviewed by reporters at KOA 850 AM (the news talk radio outlet) until they remove Mike Rosen (the hugely popular commentator on from 9-11 am weekdays). And, in this day of reporters scrambling to keep the jobs they have, snobbery within the ranks is very, very poor taste.
KOA 850 AM in Denver is a big deal – thousands listen daily during their commutes and some make it their primary Denver news source. FOX is the same kind of big dog on a national scale. Its ratings are huge and not to be ignored. Whether the administration likes it or not, if Obama wants his messages heard, he has to over-rule Ms. Dunn and reach out to FOX.
The FOX audience is too large to be ignored. And, in ridiculing FOX and trying to marginalize it, the administration is succeeding in insulting its audience. Voters. Many, many independent voters. Voters in the so-called “red states” who could, potentially, be impressed by Obama actually living up to his speeches promising to listen to those who disagree with him.
