Media Crises: Are You Ready? Is Your Staff?

What happens when a TV news reporter arrives in your office asking about:

• An accident where a child was injured?
• A construction flaw in the new facility that tax payers paid for?
• An ethics issue. Is it ethical for a board member to...?
• A controversial program or museum exhibit?

Most often the news people catch you off guard. No appointment, no preparatory phone call, often early in the morning, late at night or on a weekend.

Our natural responses to such an intrusive interview are usually all wrong.

The No Comment Response when broadcast on the evening news invariably signals the viewer that you have something to hide. When will you comment? Why are you delaying? What are you hiding?

The Innocent Response, where you deny there is a problem, is fine if you are 110% innocent. We or our organizations rarely are. When the media presents the evidence and then shows your denial it looks bad. Now you’ve committed two sins, the actual problem and the cover up.

The Natural Response occurs when you’ve done nothing and are asked to comment on another person, organization or event. “As a professional would you say such behavior is 100% in accordance with your professional ethics?”
Your respond “Well, our last association meeting did raise some questions about this kind of behavior and many thought it was unethical, but I’m not so sure.” This appears in the evening newspaper as John LaMott commented that “many thought it was unethical.”

The “You Just Get Out Of Here” Response occurs when the reporter has bated you into an unthinking, emotionally laden response.

So... What To Do?

Preparation is very powerful here. And just a little goes a long way. If you don’t prepare, you then expose yourself to your board asking why you were not prepared. Here is how to prepare.

1. Sit with your board (and again with the senior staff) and ask “What are the most potentially embarrassing or uncomfortable questions or incidents which could occur if asked in public by the media?” Have people write these down and submit them to you. This allows for more honesty. There may be some questions no one even wants to surface in a closed meeting room. Send out a reminder memo after the meeting soliciting any additional uncomfortable questions which might have come up after sleeping on the question. Remind people that the issues in the questions do not have to be TRUE. The reporter can ask any question true or not!
   
   
2. Now compile these questions. Each one on a separate sheet of paper.
   
   
3. At the next board meeting ask for a board member to volunteer for an instant media review. Find or better yet select another board member to be the aggressive, nasty reporter. Give the reporter the one question. Conduct the interview. It takes about 5 minutes. Now let the whole board discuss the response. What can we learn from this?
   
   Or use your copying machine to compose a newspaper article reporting on the crises in the museum and hand it out to the board.
   
   
4. Address one question each board or staff meeting. Professional training of this sort usually includes video taping the interviewee’s response so he or she can see it. This is a very powerful learning.
   
   
5. For homework have people notice other interviews on the evening news or morning paper. What questions were really tough to answer? What responses rang true? Which did not? Share this at the next meeting.

Consider These Topics For Your Practice Questions:

• Embezzlement
• Trustees doing business with the organization
• Trustees sitting on multiple boards
• Construction delays, flaws and over runs
• Firing an employee
• Expense accounts
• Trustees or staff receiving personal financial benefit from a vendor or client of the organization.

Special considerations for museums:

• Hidden transactions: museum staff or trustee purchases objects from a dealer while the museum is also acquiring from the same collection.
• Deaccessioning artifacts from the museum collection
• Controversial program or museum exhibit
• Theft of an object
• Trustees and/or staff acquiring deaccessioned objects.

Advice from The Trenches

1. Never lie. Do not cover up.
2. Never comment negatively or critically on the behavior of other institutions or people outside your organization.
3. Never promise a result unless you can guarantee it.
4. Never delay. Don’t say we are not prepared to comment now.

Guidance from Your Values
Review each actual or potential crisis and explore how your institutional values would guide you in responding. If they offer no guidance consider that your values may be inadequate. The best values are best because they guide your decision making.

Who Must Be Prepared?
The director, every board member and senior staff including who ever is in charge on weekends and evenings. Consider training your key volunteers also.