“NBC News”’ handling of the uproar ignited by suspended anchor Brian Williams’ false claims about having ridden in a U.S. military aircraft downed by enemy fire in Iraq is being severely questioned by public relations crisis management experts.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about the Shakespearean drama at 30 Rock,” wrote Politico’s marquee reporter Mike Allen in his widely-read Washington, D.C., tip sheet Wednesday. “But of all the ways NBC could have responded to the Brian Williams fiasco, a six-month stay of execution (and $5 million fine, if he really makes $10 million a year) is among the most baffling and brutal.”
Longtime media critic Howard Kurtz, who now works at Fox News, said Williams’ suspension was an attempt by NBC to “recover from its own botched handling of the crisis.”
“[O]nce again, corporate America has shown its staid limitations when handling misconduct among its ranks,” wrote Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple.
But crisis communications professionals interviewed by the Washington Examiner media desk tell a different story. They say NBC did what it could with the hand it was dealt — though some would argue that the network itself was the dealer.
“I’m not one of those people who ever joins the chorus of people who have never managed a crisis and declare these things to have been botched at the outset,” said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management veteran and author of Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal.
He said there is often a “ridiculous expectation” that there’s a quick way to make fast-moving crises disappear.
“We now have a culture that watches shows like [the ABC political drama] ‘Scandal’ that end with the spin doctor coolly calling the client and saying, ‘It’s handled,’” Dezenhall said. “The reality in crisis management is that nothing is handled.”
Brian Glicklich, a crisis management expert with the public relations firm Sitrick and Company, has represented high-profile clients like conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. Glicklich said Williams’ case is a familiar one.
“I am sympathetic to NBC,” he said, “because it’s hard. When something like this breaks, there’s a lot of conflicting priorities. There’s a lot of [internal voices] figuring out who’s going to formulate the response and what that response is going to be and they’re on a playing field that’s shifting literally every hour.”
Glicklich praised NBC’s decision to suspend Williams for six months without pay.
“It preserves all of their options,” he said. “It’s a severe penalty in anybody’s mind. But [NBC] can still do whatever they need to in order to resolve this. It also gives them an opportunity to really rehab [Williams] in the public’s mind.”
Critics of the Williams fallout first took issue with the anchor’s self-imposed suspension, which came last week with a note to the public that he was “presently too much a part of the news,” so he had “decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days.”
“It was self-aggrandizing,” said Brad Phillips, a former TV news reporter who now runs his own media relations firm, Phillips Media Relations. “It looked like the king removed himself from the air. He even called it ‘my broadcast.’ As anyone who’s worked in television, television news is a team effort.”
Phillips said NBC should have instead immediately suspended Williams and released a statement noting the seriousness of his actions. Still, he said, the network’s six-month suspension served as a mulligan.
“It reset the entire story,” Phillips said. “It was such a severe and serious action that all of their prior communications kind of went away. The critics got exactly what they wanted and more.”
While Williams is out, leaving weekend “Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt to fill in, some have wondered whether he will actually return to claim the anchor chair.
Dezenhall said it depends how the story progresses. “It’s called ‘damage control,’ not ‘damage never happened,’” he said. “It’s going to take time to see how NBC does, it’s going to take time to see how Brian Williams does.”
