Taking the legs out from under bad stories is the sine qua non of crisis management. It’s derived from the first law of holes: When you’re in one, stop digging.
Say something despicable on Twitter? Offer a forthright apology and delete the offensive Tweet ASAP. One of your producers/executives/editors is a serial sexual predator? Fire him, launch an internal investigation and move on. Accepting the other side’s facts removes the element of conflict from a story, weakening the narrative and its newsworthiness.
So says the received wisdom of modern public relations.
Or you can push back. You can call the other side a pack of liars or wear your shame like a peacock’s tail. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you are resolute in the spotlight. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, so make the most of the attention while you’ve got it. This is the wisdom of hucksters.
Both approaches are effective.
The first is effective when it takes the air out of the balloon, making the bad news a one-day story. The second is effective when the reaction of the accused is bigger, bolder and more newsworthy than the accusation itself, relegating the facts to a footnote.
Neither approach is particularly ethical.
The first approach is a get-honest-for-a-day gambit rooted in an appeal to redemption; a stage-managed mea culpa. Unless it marks a genuine change in the direction or culture of the institution, it’s as phony as an apology to “those who were offended.” It is a lie.
The second approach is in the showmanship tradition of Barnum, Edison and Harold Hill: humbug, hokum and bluster. The truth doesn’t matter (what is truly true, anyway?) so long as you know what I mean and believe I mean what I say. The grifter always seems authentic—he has to. But what he says is bullshit.
We’ve recently seen a swing away from true lies crisis management toward bullshit hucksterism, the result of changes in the way we produce and consume news.
Traditional crisis management is best suited to appointment news— breakfast with the morning paper, dinner with the nightly news—where editors choose the most important stories to tell in the limited time of each appointment. The most valuable commodity was the audience’s time.
Most people don’t get their news this way. Today, it’s more like cat-flap news: We’ve made a little hole in the door, and if something’s truly newsworthy it will find its way in. Facebook and Twitter, email and text alerts, will let us know when something important happens. The most valuable commodity now is the audience’s attention, and news organizations are literally screaming for it.
Which is the best deception to get out from under a crisis? (They’re mutually exclusive: Lies are tethered to the truth while bullshit floats free of factual entanglements.)
If the objective is to deceive people who consume news as a series of facts that inform their decisions, stick with the tried-and-true lies approach. If the target is folks who use news stories as social tokens—where the facts are incidental to who’s exchanging them and why—then bullshit is the best way out.
And if you find yourself choosing between lying and bullshitting your way out of your client’s problem then there’s something wrong with your counsel or your client. Our job is to prevent crises, not manage them. Friends don’t let friends dig holes.
For more about lies, read Hannah Arendt’s Lying in Politics. For more about bullshit, read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit.