This Month in Bad P.R.

As a former newspaper reporter and a current editor/public affairs professional, I was astounded by the number of public relations disasters I read in the news this month. I don’t know whether to shake my head in pity or slap the offenders upside the head.

The king of P.R. stupidity for this month, if not for 2010, is Tony Hayward, CEO for British Petroleum, or BP. (It should also stand for “Bad Press.” But I digress.) His string of gaffes should be included in every college textbook on crisis communications strategy as an example of what not to do. Newsweek listed some of Hayward’s mistakes, including:

• His May 14 attempt to persuade The Guardian that “the Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
  
• His inept attempt to play the sympathy card on the “Today” show on May 30 when he said that “there’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” (Indeed, so would the 11 workers killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the other BP workers, the fishers, the sea creatures, and anyone else affected by the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history.)
• After being relieved of being the point man for the BP oil spill, his watching a yacht race over the past weekend in Great Britain. Perception, Tony, perception!

Then there was the “slip in translation” by BP’s chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg last week when speaking to reporters after meeting with President Obama. The New York Times reported Svanberg, who is Swedish, said, “People say that large oil companies don’t care about the small people. But we care. We care about the small people.” I can understand that English is not Svanberg’s native tongue, but that comment rubbed salt onto the open wounds of Gulf Coast residents.

Note to BP: Please stop while you’re behind.

Enough of my BP rant. I also have some advice for California Attorney General and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown: Please don’t speak to strangers while you’re jogging. Talking to a KCBS radio reporter, Brown compared Republican opponent Meg Whitman’s advertising blitz to the propaganda of World War II Nazi official Joseph Goebbels. The term “Nazi” is culturally and racially charged and should be used sparingly. I guess it’s hard to think logically and jog at the same time.

I will finish this blog entry with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who openly criticized the Obama Administration in a Rolling Stone article being released this week. In “The Runaway General,” Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan found the president “uncomfortable and intimidated” in a Pentagon meeting with McChrystal and other generals. McChrystal and his aides also bad-mouthed Vice President Joe Biden, special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.

According to the magazine’s editor Eric Bates, the conversations were on the record, although some were “not for attribution.” What McChrystal learned the hard way is that journalists are sharks. When they smell blood, they attack. They’ll take whatever we can get. Everything said is fair game.

President Obama has summoned McChrystal for a White House meeting on Wednesday. I guess we know whose ass is getting kicked.

Writing Diva