Aug
15
LaTrobe Annual Lecture & Bad News
Filed Under Public Relations | 1 Comment
Attended the La Trobe Uni Annual Media Studies lecture last night where the ACCC’s Graham Samuel talked engagingly about Australia’s changing media landscape. Broadly restated all the stuff I’ve been reading in Freidman’s The World Is Flat, but with a few Aussie specifics. So, I raised a few points from the floor:
I challenged his view on the ‘credibility’ of current media, citing the Fox Network, UK’s News of the World plus one or two rogue journos as evidence etc. Also asked if the increasingly participative & selective citizen media culture would lead to the end of fourth estate journalism & possibly the end of ’spin’. Read more
Aug
9
As my book ‘PR Disasters’ suggests, the term is applied to ‘anything and everything negative that happens happens to a company or organization’, most commonly when PR jobs go wrong.
From my personal research of all kinds of PR gaffes, the common denominator linking all ‘PR disasters’ is, adverse media coverage. Strange then, that in the coverage over ‘The Age’ columnist Terry Lane – who has fallen from grace for his failure to fact check and for reporting a completely fabricated story about Iraq – I didn’t see it referred to as a PR disaster for the journo or the paper.
From Mel’s drunken anti-Semitic outburst to Israel’s current anti-Hezbollah campaign, many media commentators are quick to apply the ‘PR disaster’ label. Yet when a journo or newspaper stuffs up in a big way – by violating public trust or respect - it’s somehow never dubbed a PR disaster.
The consequences are the same – extensively judgement media comment, embarrassment, tainted reputation and loss of personal or consumer confidence. And the restorative path – which Lane has followed quite nobly - is the same, too; regret,responsibility and remedial action.
Seriously, can anyone tell me why newspapers don’t as readily apply the ‘PR disaster’ tag when it clearly applies to their own kind?
Aug
7
Mel’s not-so-little PR disaster
Filed Under Celebrity | Leave a Comment
Breakheart
It’s disheartening, almost sickening to watch the media vultures circle and pick at the debilitated body of the once revered, now reviled, Aussie actor ‘Mad’ Mel Gibson and his very public PR disaster.
Gibson clearly has a physiological compulsion and crippling susceptibility to alcohol.
If you can accept that it is a disease (and the American Medical Association does), then would it be right to stomp Gibson down because he’d been diagnosed with cancer and thrown a drug-fuelled fit? In all likelihood guilty of DUI, insulting a police officer and verbally savaging Jews and women, Mel has responsibly ‘fessed up to his wrongdoings with a textbook Crisis Management statement. Rather than playing it by the old PR book, though, wouldn’t it have been refreshing to hear the fundamentalist Mel really get down to brass tacks. He could’ve started by acknowledging that somehow, somewhere within him, there is a bit of a bigoted streak?
It’da been ballsy, but I hope there’s still enough fight in the man to really come clean; I hear self-honesty is a key part of the recovery process of ‘getting clean’. I also pray that Mel is in rehab for the right reason, too. And that’s to genuinely overcome his addiction, not just to make it look that he’s taking his punishment for stepping way, way out of line. After that’s been done, then he can really look at appropriate ways of making amends to those he has sledged and offended. Following his dumb-assed outbursts and inability to curb his drink compulsion, I’d hope that excitable media and associated commentators will see that in this huge PR disaster, Mel the addict is probably the one who’s hurting most right now.