By Fraser P. Seitel
It’s been quite a month for PR firings.
March 8, National Public Radio’s fund-raising chief was canned (officially, he "resigned"), after being caught on tape bad-mouthing tea party activists, some of whom are now sitting in Congress debating NPR’s funding. In the fallout, NPR’s president, who shared the surname but not the family of the fired development director, also "resigned."
March 10, an account supervisor at New Media Strategies dropped the F-bomb in a tweet, launched mistakenly from client Chrysler’s @ChryslerAutos account, and the car company sacked him and his agency.
March 13, State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley bit the dust, after criticizing his Administration’s policy with supposedly suicidal prisoner, Pfc. Bradley Manning, the accused Wikileaks leaker.
And then just this past Monday, big mouth comic Gilbert Gottfried lost his quack at Aflac, as the insurance company lowered the boom after Gilbert tweeted several decidedly politically-incorrect "jokes" about the Japanese earthquake.
And March isn’t even over yet!
And while no one ever wants to see anyone lose their job, all these people probably deserved to be offed.
Each, in his own way, violated the PR precept that PR representatives owe their loyalty to the "person who signs the paycheck." If a PR professional displays disloyalty to the client – as each of these individuals did -- then he or she should expect to be disciplined, even fired.
Let’s briefly review each of these disloyal infractions.
The NPR development director never should have spilled his guts to the right wing video swat team posing as fat cat Muslims. As a senior NPR representative, his labeling of tea partiers as "racists" was not only indelicate, it was stupid.
It reflected poorly on NPR, even if the organization’s continued federal funding wasn’t hanging in the balance. The comment served no possible purpose, other than to damage the man’s employer. His firing was justified.
The Chrysler account executive’s tweet was a mistake. He thought he was using his own Twitter account, when he mistakenly tweeted the following from @ChryslerAutos account:
"I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f---ing drive."
The errant expletive tweet quickly spread to Chrysler blogs, and the agency was quickly terminated by Chrysler, with a dopey rationale about violating "the company’s policy about texting while driving."
Chrysler’s clumsiness notwithstanding, the company was right to get rid of its agency. Even if the company were in solid condition – which it’s not – it simply can’t tolerate its associates using offensive language, demeaning potential clients, and castigating its headquarters city.
The outgoing account exec should have realized that as a PR representative of a public company, every time he opens his mouth or sends a message, he stands at risk.
The Crowley case was different still.
For two years, Mr. Crowley served ably as Secretary Hillary Clinton’s press secretary. A distinguished member of the U.S. Air Force for two decades, Crowley was a second generation PR professional. His father, William Crowley, was a longtime vice president for PR of the Boston Red Sox.
Accordingly, P.J. Crowley acquitted himself well in the difficult position as State Department spokesman. And his performance in the job wasn’t what got him fired. That came about when Mr. Crowley, in answer to a question at a new media and foreign policy seminar at MIT, denounced the Obama Administration’s treatment of Pfc. Manning as "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."
The private, of course, has been subject to "restrictive procedures" at his prison cell in Quantico, including removing his clothes when he sleeps so he won’t hang himself.
Maybe Mr. Crowley had a point. He did qualify his remarks by acknowledging that the view was his, personally, and that Pfc. Manning was, indeed, "in the right place."
It didn’t matter.
Crowley’s comments, immediately reported again via Twitter, rankled the White House enough to demand – and receive – the beleaguered spokesman’s immediate resignation.
While the left wing blogosphere cried bloody murder over the firing – "It’s o.k. to hold an American citizen convicted of doing nothing, but not o.k. to talk about it." – President Obama was absolutely right to can Crowley.
As a spokesman, your job is to convey the philosophy and policy of your management. If you can’t do that because you so viscerally disagree with management’s decisions – then either keep your own views to yourself or quit.
That’s what President Gerald Ford’s press secretary, Jerald Ter Horst, did in 1974 when Ford pardoned former President Richard Nixon. Ter Horst disagreed, couldn’t bring himself to announce the decision, and quit one month into his job.
As a PR spokesman, if you can’t support the boss, then just get out.
And then there was good old, Gilbert Gottfried, who has made a fortune serving as the voice of the Aflac duck.
But when the comedian, for some inexplicable reason, couldn’t resist trying out some "Japanese earthquake jokes" on (what else?) Twitter, Aflac quickly severed what had been a 10-year relationship. (Maybe Mr. Crowley can be the new Aflac duck.)
The point in all this is that for a PR representative in the 21st century, when a slip of the lip or a nit Twit can be disseminated far and wide in the blink of an eye, it is "client loyalty" that trumps "free speech" every time. |