Significant lessons and warnings for communications and reputation management professionals
Having spent most of the past 48 hours being mined for my thoughts on the BBC Presenter story I will try to distil here what I see as the most significant lessons and warnings for communications and reputation management professionals. Please visit (and subscribe to) the Borkowski Substack for my thoughts in full.
The Sun used to thrive on these kinds of innuendo-laden scandals and have proven that they still have the power to launch a national conversation, but the fact that well into the week we still do not know for sure who the presenter is suggests that the paper is being tightly muzzled by lawyers, and advertisers, with increasing doubts about the public interest argument for their identity ever seeing the light of day.
The contestation (via lawyer) by the story’s young co-protagonist that its most scandalous elements are not true have added further negativity and questions about the ethics of publishing the original. The Sun is now fighting ugly reputation battles on several fronts.
Discourse around the story also demonstrates the truism that everyone is an expert nowadays. Social media is now an army of media law connoisseurs whose excoriation of the Sun (not to mention speculation about the details of the story itself) has added a level of obsessed – if frequently misinformed- detail to an already explosive scandal.
Ironically the explosive nature of this story might afford some protection to The Sun, the BBC and the presenter. We live in the age of what Johann Hari coined as ‘Stolen Focus’ in which we as a general public and social media commentariat are fickle, easily distracted and have an incredibly short memory. This means that even a severe reputation crisis can be practically wiped from public memory, buried under a thousand other scandals and infinite hot takes.
Of course, any respite the BBC gets will owe very little to its crisis management strategy. Once again the corporation has the turning circle of a supertanker when it comes to corrective manoeuvres in a crisis. Not helped by an equally sluggish police comms operation, the BBC deployed a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude only to suspend the presenter in question and call in the authorities just in time for the contestation by the young person’s lawyer that there may not be a case to answer.
The collective consequence of this surreal circus is that the public loses further trust in the very media institutions that a functioning society needs to act as instruments of truth. It might sound dramatic, but such shaken confidence in our mass communications infrastructure, and our increasing struggle to accept ‘news’ as the truth of what’s happening in the world, microscopically loosens our grip on reality. Every good propagandist knows that a bewildered herd is easily led astray. Quality communications with a genuine concern for the truth have never been more important.