White House Press Office Shoots Blanks

The success of last week’s killing of terrorist Osama Bin Laden cannot be overstated. It was a heroic effort, well planned and well executed with well-deserved praise for all involved. It’s just too bad the way the administration communicated the details of Bin Laden’s death hasn’t done justice to the occasion. As a result, this case study provides some sharp lessons for professional communicators and our clients in the corporate world. While this commentary is in no way meant to detract from the significant victory the President, US military and intelligence agencies have given the world, it is only fair to dissect what went wrong in sharing that good news with the public.

While it’s understandable that the White House would move quickly to tell the world of Bin Laden’s death by controlling the timing and release of information, it would have been more than appropriate for administration executives to all be singing off the same song sheet before “meeting the press”. The number of inconsistencies in administration comments, and remarks from elected officials and policy makers who received top secret briefings about what actually transpired is mind-numbing, leaving us to wonder how a 45-minute military action could spur so many different versions of how it played out.

“A protracted firefight…no, wait. Only one man had a weapon. Three men killed…no wait, four. A woman used as a human shield…no wait, she really wasn’t. It was his wife and she was killed…I mean shot in the leg. Bin Laden went down fighting…but he was unarmed. There were weapons nearby. He resisted…but he didn’t. We watched the entire thing play out remotely in the White House…but for 20 minutes we had no idea what was happening”. Things got so bad in the delivery of multiple messages by multiple “informed” sources that on Wednesday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney, was reduced to reading a multi-page statement verbatim, head down like a school boy who’d never seen the material before. On Wednesday, even Senator Barbara Boxer, who received a thorough White House briefing on the events in Pakistan, felt compelled to pepper her media comments with statements like “as I understand it” and “as I was told”, clearly leaving room for future equivocation.

Former G.W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer (who certainly knows a thing or two about poor communication) had it right when he described the administration’s handling of the news as “sloppy messaging”.

Ironically, through a combination of mistakes often made by corporate America in responding to crisis and evolving circumstances, the people around The Great Communicator 2.0 have let their boss down and tarnished a bit the brightest moment of the Obama administration. The reality is that if a corporation in crisis had sent the mixed signals communicated by the White House, that entity would be flayed in the media with an immediate and near irreversible loss of credibility as their crisis played itself out before the world.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the basic mistakes made and put them in the context of a corporate communications response.

First, while the need for speed and controlling the flow of information is critical, in and of itself it is not the end game. Facts need to be gathered and validated before being presented as such. And, as we know from communicating about oil spills, plant explosions and other fluid incidents, there’s nothing wrong with honestly admitting that “we don’t yet have all the answers” or “some details are still emerging”. The media and public are far more understanding of a staggered approach to communicating good or bad news than they are of misinformation and the distribution of speculations and half-truths.

Try this instead: “Here’s what we do know. And here’s what we don’t. We’ll fill in the blanks when all the facts are in.”

Second, the use of so many official spokespersons to distribute what should essentially be the same fixed message has its own pitfalls. Even word choices and simple misunderstandings and mistranslations of the facts can and do feed on themselves in a way that spins out of control. In reality, there was no need for the administration to put so many different people before the media in such short order. Corporations in crisis that make this same mistake will pay an even steeper price in the court of public opinion.

Third, it is more than a bit disappointing that unnamed sources in the administration are even now doling out juicy facts regarding a high level national security incident in a way that more resembles leaks than a full public disclosure of the whole story. Whether inside the Presidential administration or inside a corporate board room, people in the know have no business leaking privileged information to the media. In either eventuality it is a dangerous precedent that jeopardizes the credibility of the official spokespersons and risks the flow of inaccurate information and speculation that can result when hordes of journalists compete for “the inside scoop”.

In summary, the same characteristics that were hallmarks of the compound raid itself should have been applied to communicating about it: thorough planning, patience, and coordination.