Blaming the Intern

It is likely that most people will go into the professional world as an intern, or at least have internship experience at some point. This is an inevitable fact in any profession. I myself, have held several internships throughout the years.

I can’t help but notice the undeniable presence of “blaming the intern” in crisis communication. Seemingly a go-to tactic for organizations that have controversial mishaps while communicating.

This was brought to my attention by my roommate who gave a presentation about the PR fail surrounding the Asiana Airlines flight 214 crash last July. In the aftermath of the crash, the NTSB released the names of the pilots to the KTVU news station. The problem was that they were fake names. Not only were they fake, they were offensively racist. “Sum Ting Wong,” “Ho Lee Fuk,” “Wi Tu Lo” and “Bang Ding Ow” were the names given to the media by NTSB. Remarkably KTVU, in a major failure of oversight, reported the names on live television. Long story short, the NTSB blamed the offensive “joke” on a summer intern.

This story sparked some inspiration, so I did a little research and found that it is not a rare occurrence to blame an intern when communication errors take place.

Here are some other famous instances of blaming the intern for PR faux pas:

• During the 2008 presidential election, a website was created for “McCain Family Recipes.” Essentially supposed to be a cookbook to make the public feel “at home” with John McCain and family. Problems arose when the recipes listed were directly copied from Food Network recipes. Needless to say, goodbye intern.
• Habitat, a furnishings retailer based out of London, blamed and fired an intern after trying to use the election protests in Iran as a promotional vehicle on twitter in 2009.
• In May 2011, when Allure magazine sent out an emails to the blogosphere urging them to “say something nice, or don’t say anything at all” they blamed the intern for not understanding editorial policies.

Their are countless examples of interns becoming scapegoats, especially when it comes to social media.

So what is it about the intern?

I mean, they are the obvious scapegoat material – unpaid, expendable, temporary. But I can’t help but wonder if all these mishaps were actually the fault of the intern.

There are several possibilities to why this takes place. The organizations may be giving to much freedom and responsibility to under experienced employees (interns), they may be asking their interns to take part in risky communication with the knowledge that they have a scapegoat, or the intern isn’t actually involved but they divert blame in order to protect the organization as a whole.

I’m sure that the reasons behind blaming interns changes on a situational basis. In terms of the NTSB blunder, I can’t imagine a scenario that would contradict an intern being at fault. In what world would any intern do something like that though? Maybe they were disgruntled. Maybe they were under the influence. Whatever the reason, it was poor form.

The moral of the story… Tread lightly if you’re an intern.

Crisis Issue Management

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia

Being as though I am a college student majoring in public relations, I have access to some of the most brightest and critical minds in the industry; my professors. So I’ll take this opportunity to share some insight that I received from Pat Curtin, who was not only the acting PR chair for the school of journalism here at UO, she also has years of experience in the industry.

She gave a lecture on crisis communication and image management during my Strategic Planning class.

While I have frequently alluded to advice given to me by colleagues, teachers or guest speakers, it is interesting to note that different people have different opinions regarding how to go about communicating during a crisis.

What is issue management?

To understand issue management you must first define what an issue is in terms of PR. An issue is a gap between an organization’s actions and its stakeholders expectations. When these are at odds, there is a potential for crisis.

Issue management is aimed at proactively closing that gap. Communicating in a way that reassures and mends the cognitive dissonance experienced by stakeholders.

I wont go into detail on her opinions about planning and preparing for crisis, as they align with others advice which I have put forth in recent posts (contingency plans, go over plans at least once a year, etc).

The most surprising piece of advice she gave; lawyers are never your friend during a crisis.

Why are lawyers not your friend? The prerogative of lawyers is to deny guilt. This is obviously to protect the organization from legal consequences. But as communicators, transparency is essential in the wake of disaster.

To successfully communicate during a crisis you must know what mistakes not to make. So here are some common mistakes to avoid during a crisis:

• hesitation
• obfuscation
• retaliation
• prevarication
• pontification
• confrontation
• litigation

In other words, do not hesitate, confuse, fight back, evade, mouth off, challenge or get into legal disputes.

Moon-bound media relations

Image courtesy of Robert Daly

As a student of PR, I keep track of the general happenings of the industry. I try to critically look at campaigns, successes and failures and the historical context of public relations, to learn from what other people/organizations have done.

With that said, for some reason I have never considered the public relations that goes into the NASA program. Minor oversight… My bad.

That was until I read the article, “How PR landed humans on the moon.” Needless to say, my mind was blown.

The article looked at the PR and communications involved in the Apollo program. Apparently NASA’s PR team was relatively small considering the scope of the organization and the event of landing on the moon. But that’s where it gets interesting, much of the PR was contracted or outsourced to the companies that worked with NASA, such as Boeing. Considering these other companies wanted word to get out of their involvement with the Apollo program, their interests aligned. This is a story of communications partnership.

This partnership worked out to the enormous benefit of NASA. They could focus on the technical, scientific components of sending a rocket to the moon for the first time ever, not get bogged down by publicizing the event.

The article goes on to explain the enormous collaborative effort that went in to creating press kits for each of the partnering companies. They had to make their press kits stand out from all the background noise. I mean, anyone and everyone was putting out materials about the lunar landing. It was a historic event of epic proportions. If, say, Boeing wanted to get proper recognition of their involvement in the program, they had to send out press kits that were better than all the rest, give information that couldn’t be found elsewhere, or suggest interesting one of a kind stories.

But at the same time every other partner or stakeholder was trying to do the same thing. The competition was fierce. Reminds me of the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of the African savannah. But really, thats what media relations is. As PR practitioners it is our job to make our clients story stand out from all the noise. There is and will always be competition for media space.

Sometimes it takes a little innovation, some creativity on our part to get noticed.