Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In one of its final reports before being pulled off the air, NBCs Rock Center committed a sin in an interview with a Rabbi.

...For us -- the larger teaching point here is no matter the explanation -- you should always protect yourself if you are going into an interview that could in any way be controversial or contentious.  We teach our clients that it is kosher to tell the media that they too will be making audio -- or preferably video recordings of every interview.

Armed with that kind of backup -- if you are taken out of context or misrepresented -- you can, as Rabbi Berkowitz did -- correct the record. 

When this book author went on the Fox News Channel, he encountered a biased anchor. He handled it so well, his book soared to #1 on Amazon's bestseller list.

I’ve seen a lot of biased, ill-informed, and journalistically lazy interviews through the years, and this one was one of the worst. But the author who was the target of the anchor’s ire stood up to her questions well—and, in part due to his deft handling of that interview, currently has Amazon’s top-selling book.

Writer Reza Aslan—a prolific author who holds a Ph.D. in the sociology of religion—appeared on the Fox News Channel to discuss his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Fox News anchor Lauren Green went into the interview clearly skeptical of the book—less for its content, about which she was clearly unfamiliar—but because Aslan is Muslim. And a Muslim writing about Jesus was just too much for her to take....

It's a tough paradox. If you don't respond to a crisis, you'll look bad. If you do, you may make more people aware of it. So what should you do? If your organization is in the midst of a giant, well-publicized media crisis, you can safely assume that most people have heard about it. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about your response widening awareness of the crisis.

Since the public already knows about it, you’re not going to make them aware of the incident for the first time simply by responding to it. But what happens if your organization is in the middle of a “mini crisis,” one which is only known to a specific audience or is confined to a specific news outlet or medium?

A reader named Nicole recently asked the following question: “Do you (or others) have any thoughts about how to carefully refute a negative story without directing a new audience to it? For example, if you decide to communicate to your audience via social media or a company website or blog, are you inspiring those who may have not seen the original negative story to seek it out?” I reached out to a couple of my PR peers for help in answering her question....

The caffeine drink 5-Hour Energy is linked to 13 deaths. The company's CEO disputes that -- but a recent interview on Fox News did him no favors.

...Read the language in that article closely, and you’ll see why the company’s CEO and Founder, Manoj Bhargava, is frustrated. The company is being associated with more than a dozen deaths, but the best the FDA could do is cite the product’s “possible involvement” in those cases, in which the product “has been mentioned.” Not exactly a smoking gun....

Mr. Bhargava made some good points during the interview. Comparing the caffeine count in his product to that of a cup of Starbucks coffee, for example, provided viewers with useful information. And his analogy to a bottle of water being “linked” to deaths also demonstrated the weakness of the case against his product.

But his tone was lousy, and he violated at least two of the “seven rules of a crisis,” notably numbers five (“your response needs to be about the victims”) and six (“facts are not enough.”)...

[Brad Phillips shares an excellent media training lesson ~ Jeff]