The most potent myth of all is that by hounding and denouncing Rupert Murdoch we are somehow helping clean up British politics, its police and its journalism. I’m predisposed to say that instead of doing any such thing we are in danger of indulging in humbug. We risk laying ourselves open to swallowing a load of dodgy claims from Murdoch’s rivals and from politicians seeking the moral high-ground.

Only this weekend Britain’s Business Secretary Vince Cable called for an end to media moguls, as if the real problem was that Rupert Murdoch had too much power and influence over British society. However, that’s just not so.

We live in age of digital fragmentation when the media is global in reach, not just local. There are myriad opinion-forming sources today. The world’s media is just a click or two away from anybody with online access. We live in an era in which media barons have less power than they’ve ever had.

One cannot compare the power that Lord Northcliffe (a former owner of The Times) had over British public opinion in the early 20th century with that held by Rupert Murdoch in the early 21st century. For example, Winston Churchill criticised Northcliffe’s role in the First World War, saying he: “wielded power without official responsibility, enjoyed secret knowledge without the general view, and disturbed the fortunes of national leaders without being willing to bear their burdens.”

Certainly, in Northcliffe’s day – the high tide of print media – his influence was not challenged by competitors such as multiple radio and TV channels, and the near infinite content of the internet. Though, of course, Northcliffe did have competitors in the print realm, such as Lord Beaverbrook, who became Britain’s Minister of Information in 1918.

So, once upon a time there was perhaps truth in the notion that media barons of the likes of Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and Lord Northcliffe were overly-influential. But one can hardly claim credibly that such a state of affairs applies today.

The idea that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers were responsible for Margaret Thatcher’s victories and for Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party’s humiliation in the 1980s beggars belief. It is also hard to believe that Murdoch was responsible for Tony Blair’s victories or for Gordon Brown’s defeat.

The evidence suggests that Murdoch’s newspapers swung this and that way with the tide, pulled not by the moon but by the bright glow of the side most likely to win. For sure, there was no Murdoch-led swing to Cameron at the 2010 General Election so much as crumbling support for Gordon Brown’s New Labour. This allowed an almost-electorally-stagnant Tory party to form a coalition government with the Lib Dems, whose seats in parliament declined despite gaining positive media endorsement from virtually every publishing house in the UK.

The question then is why did Britain’s political elite, not to mention its police, get so entangled with Murdoch’s empire and so desperate to court its favours? I see two main reasons:

1. For the political elite Murdoch’s camp was the only major media house not permanently tied to any particularly party of the so-called left and right divide. In contrast, the likes of The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and even the BBC, were much more fixed in their ideological and political outlook and loyalties.

2. Britain’s Establishment, including the elite in politics and the police, genuinely over-estimated Murdoch’s and the media’s influence. They lived in fear of it. In response, they sought to mingle with it, schmooze it, neutralize it, and to co-opt it and thereby gain access to its popular appeal. Collectively the Establishment displayed a lack of nerve, not to mention a lack of nous about the relationship between public opinion and the media (we can put some of the blame on poor PR advice from PR pros).

This is not to say that the media is without influence or unimportant. It is to say that politicians and the police have exaggerated the media’s powers and underestimated their own. If the public has not become subservient to sections of the media, some of the elite certainly have.

The elite delusion that garnering headlines is a short-cut to winning popularity with the public provides the only logical explanation as to why David Cameron took the known risk of hiring Andy Coulson as his media guru. In my view, Cameron’s number-one concern was containing and managing the media, in particular Murdoch’s media. It is an approach to engaging the public that unravels again and again

Unfortunately, the current crisis has not seen politicians regain their sense of self-worth. Neither has it taught the police to hold their nerve in the face of a media onslaught.

The political class now seems set on intruding into the media’s realm. The House of Commons Select Committee has totally over-reacted. It has, as my friend Richard D North points out here, gone way beyond its remit. It has in the process brought down elite police officers of the class of Yates and Stephenson without good cause. It is in danger of victimising the entire Murdoch empire in a vain attempt to court popularity with Murdoch’s formidable rivals in the media world, not to mention the Twitterati.

So what lessons do I think we learn from this hacking scandal? What PR advice do I have to offer to (a) Murdoch (b) MPs and (c) the police? Well here goes:

What we should learn?

First, media competition is alive and well, if not always well behaved. The crimes at the News of The World were exposed by its rivals. The upshot was that rather than revealing how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, it revealed how fragile his influence was.

However, the elite are now in danger of exchanging their faith in Murdoch’s illusory grip on public opinion with a misplaced faith in the liberal media’s and the Twitterati’s grip. In other words, politicians and police are now seemingly bent on trying to please yet another set of media influencers led by The Guardian.

In today’s increasingly disterintermediated world institutions can communicate directly with the public. As for the established media, firms and institutions of all sorts would do well to keep their media relations much less intimate and much more formal. The truth is that the media gets close to its marks in order to rip them apart whenever it desires. That’s a lesson that we need to take to heart.

What should Murdoch do?

He should do what he’s doing: grovel. He must be open and honest and clean up his house and rid himself of the rottenness, but also the poor governance, in his empire. (See the difficulties facing FIFA.) That is going to hurt. It might even bring down his own son. It is most likely going to send some of his employees to prison. But if he gets it right, News International could restore its reputation and perhaps make it more robust than ever.

What should politicians do?

Politicians should also own up to the truth. They share much of the guilt with News International. From Prime Minister David Cameron downwards, the relationship between politicians and the media – that’s with the entire media – has been grubby. They should apologise for that. They should seek forgiveness. At the same time they must set out in a new direction based on a new strategy that they communicate clearly.

To begin with they should stop the witch hunt against Rupert Murdoch, which is a trap that merely favours one set of media players at the expense of another. Instead, they need to get a sense of perspective over this whole messy affair. They must demonstrate their independence from the media by setting their own agenda. Disintermediated communication is what they need. Back to the soapbox, lads. That’s an approach which is far more likely to demonstrate integrity and to win the public’s respect than any amount of media schmoozing could ever achieve.

What should the police do?

First, they should reject the notion (put about by critics and even some friends) about how it is working class coppers who cannot fathom the complexities and subtler roles of today’s world. Let’s not forget that it was Oxbridge and classy coppers such as Sir Ian Blair (see here), Sir Paul Stephenson, John Yates and Brian Paddick who all messed up their affairs most embarrassingly precisely because they became obsessed with becoming part of the new political and media Establishment in order to manage public perception.

In contrast, I advise: the police should recognise that the media are animals; newsrooms are sausage factories; and that nevertheless, sometimes, they have their uses. But coppers have to accept that theirs is an unpopular role and that poor public perception comes with their beat. Just like judges, they need to keep their distance if they are to maintain their integrity in the face of the public. Sorry to say, but coppers just have to come to terms with the fact that theirs is a lonely role. They cannot expect much thanks from anyone, least of all politicians, for doing a great job.

In short, coppers should become more obsessed with being professional and much less concerned with being popular, which is an obsession that paradoxically has done more harm than good to their image.

It was the likes of the Labour politician Keith Vaz who hounded Yates and Stephenson so much that they felt obliged to resign. That had all the hallmarks of a hunt for scapegoats. Both coppers had distinguished records. They were “guilty” of little more than poor judgement and poor PR instincts. They forged some embarrassing personal links and made the odd omission etc.. A slap on the wrist at some point in the future might have been much more in the public interest than chopping off their heads. I believe that Stephenson and Yates should have resisted the pressure to resign. That leads me to my major observations on the whole affair.

The Big Picture

The time has come for institutions of all sorts to hold their nerve in the face of Grub Street’s rants and raving. Society does not require more controls over the media. Rather the elite requires more self-control and stronger nerves.

It is time for PRs to recommend forging a new relationship between their clients, the media and the public. It is time that PRs helped leaders lead. It is time to take back control of the reputations of public institutions from the media.

No related pages.

Writing this piece has forced me to reread Norman Levitt (1943 – 2009), professor of Maths at Rutgers. He was among the first warriors to take up cudgels in the Science Wars against left-wing postmodernists in the Academy. He maintained that their social constructivism, epistemic relativism and cognitive pluralism is in reality reductio ad absurdum.

Professor Norman Levitt

Levitt was clearly polemical in style. But he confronted some equally robust opponents. After Levitt died, Professor Steve Fuller, an American sociologist now based at Warwick University, opined that Levitt had been a pioneer of “cyber-fascism”. Fuller accused Levitt of having lived in a parallel universe, in which he positioned postmodernists as playing the role of Jews in need of extermination. Sticking the knife deeper in the man’s corpse he said that Levitt’s major contribution to the debate was a steady stream of invective. He added that Levitt’s robust defence of science was merely the noise made by a loser who felt disenfranchised from the mainstream. So this debate was not nice or polite or for softies.

Of course, what should be remembered is that Fuller blamed Levitt for being behind the Sokal Affair. This, for those new to this stuff, refers to Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, who wrote Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity for an academic journal devoted to postmodern cultural studies. It was full of intentional howlers, such as claiming that quantum gravity was a social linguistic construction.

The resulting furore was a major embarrassment to the journal Social Text, which published it, and damaging to the reputation of postmodernist theorists. Professor Fuller was especially outraged because he had one of his own papers in the same edition of the journal. The Sokal Hoax seemed to underscore the claim made by Levitt that for narrow-minded ideological reasons, left-wing academics wrote and published nonsense about science.

Professor Alan Sokal

In reality this was much more than a squabble between left- and right-wing thinkers. Levitt might well have been on the right of the political spectrum, but Sokal was on the left. Moreover, Levitt had no time for right-wing conservatives who wanted to teach intelligent design or creationism in schools. What united the likes of Levitt and Sokal was their defence of science. They maintained that there was no such thing as “left-wing science”, as the postmodernists claimed, no more than there was such a thing as “right-wing science” or “feminist Algebra” (no I didn’t make that up and neither did Levitt).

Their concern was that postmodernist academics promoted a disdain for scientific principles, which struck at the heart of what science was about. They argued that this had negative consequences for society at large because it spread distrust about science, scientists and the benefits of the Enlightenment. Postmodernists were said to be promoting instead, what Levitt called, muddle-headedness:

“Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled themselves with a simple problem in statics; essays that make knowing reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognise, much less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about the semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they take lowers blood pressure.” (Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science, by Norman Levitt and Paul Gross)

For sure, when Levitt criticised postmodernism he fully understood that how scientific knowledge was used was indeed a social and political issue. What concerned him, however, was the suggestion that scientific methodologies and theorizing itself was a social (subjective) construction that produced little more than metaphors. Levitt said repeatedly, mathematical equations are anything but metaphors. He rightly pointed out that mathematics and science have a substance and complexity, which metaphors can’t really capture.

Levitt robustly defended the integrity of books such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which were denounced by Professor Fuller as Cold War narratives. In his book on Thomas Kuhn, Fuller even goes as far as to say that Kuhn’s work helped dupe scientists into supporting Western militarism in the fight against Soviet and Chinese communism. In short, Fuller’s view of science leans toward viewing it as little more than a conspiracy organised by the Establishment.

So, that’s enough background. Now let’s take a step closer to understanding what might be attracting PRs to take a serious look at Chaos Theory. One of the great attractions of Chaos Theory to social theorists, and in PR to critics of Jim Grunig’s work, is its emphasis on the importance of nonlinear mathematical and scientific enquiry in its search for patterns and associations in seemingly complex and chaotic systems. But what I’m not putting under the microscope today is Chaos Theory in its scientific incarnation. What I’m questioning is how it has been exploited for other purposes by people with no understanding of, or respect for, scientific methods.

The appeal of Chaos Theory to social scientists of a particular type was its seemingly novel (in the world of scientific enquiry) reliance on nonlinear methodologies. As one reviewer of Levitt’s work put it, this appeared to provide ammunition in support of cultural relativism:

“To cultural theorists, the word ‘linear’ represents relentless sequentiality, single mindedness and the triumph of the instrumental — all components of the supposed Western ethos of conquest, domination and objectification. ‘Nonlinear’, on the other hand, for them suggests many-sidedness, multi-culturalism, polymorphism and the effacement of traditional disciplines — a world where multiplicity reigns in culture, sexuality and ethnicity and where old barriers may be freely crossed.”

In books such as Katherine Hayles’ Chaos Bound it was argued that Newtonian thinking had been overthrown, when in fact it had been subsumed, which, as Levitt said repeatedly, is something completely different. Moreover, she – and many other postmodernists – wrongly state that Newtonian physics is mechanical and linear in its fundamentals. That, as Levitt explained, is nonsense. In fact, Newton’s laws of celestial mechanics and his equations of planetary motion are nonlinear to their core.

Levitt’s critique of Hayles’ book cites her ignorance of basic scientific principles. On virtually every subject she discussed from Newtonian science, quantum mechanics, logical positivism, to the special theory of relativity, right through to her limited grasp of mathematics, Levitt found fundamental errors.

Just how ridiculous this postmodernist muddling of maths, science and culture can get is illustrated by Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, which condemned Newton’s Principia Mathematica for being a “rape manual”.

So the red lights started flashing when I started reading Priscilla Murphy’s influential paper Chaos Theory as a Model for Managing Issues and Crises. My pen-friend Heather Yaxley had already informed me that Murphy’s critique of Jim Grunig’s two-way symmetric model had been partly responsible for persuading him to rejig it as a mixed-motive model that took more account of asymmetric reality. To my despair I quickly discovered that Murphy’s understanding of Chaos Theory was firmly rooted in Hayles’ Chaos Bound. For instance, Murphy makes the following observation:

“In fact, chaos theory generally represents a postmodern departure  from the social science worldview that unfolded from theories about  the physical universe articulated by Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. According to this tradition, the universe actions is like a vast machine governed by unchanging laws that can be deciphered  through scientific  analysis. This view leaves little to chance,  for reality is basically static [sic, she's referring to Statics here which she thinks means fixed or static, so she completely misconstrues Newton] and tautological. Time is ‘reversible,’ meaning that one could go forwards or backwards at any point  and the same essential laws would be in operation. In contrast, chaos  theory urges us ‘to reinterpret the universe as being constituted by  forces of disorder, diversity, instability and non-linearity.’”

Her mistake, besides not understanding science, was to ever have supposed that our understanding of the human world could be built around what Newton and Einstein and others discovered about the material world. And just to illustrate how gross errors of reasoning and understanding get repeated, here’s Murphy citing Hayles as an authority:

“The ‘reality’ that describes a given phenomenon is determined, not by its  universal qualities, but by the observer who chooses the scale. Such concepts have created a convergence between chaos theory and the postmodern realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying  components of human experience are not  natural facts of life but social constructions.”

The problem here is that science itself is being accused of being little more than a subjective, social construction. The charge is that science has little to no claim to objectivity. Accepting such premises would make dismissing Global Warming easy and dismissing Creationism and defending Darwin difficult.

One of my points today is merely that when PRs try to wrap their crisis management expertise and their cultural insights in the language of Chaos Theory and complexity theory (which also interests Priscilla Murphy) they are spouting hogwash.

Of course, there is much more to say on this subject. This post of mine is but a first instalment. But before I depart I’d like to put what’s going to become my core proposition. It is my intention, for instance, to review Jim Macnamara’s The 21st Century Media (R)evolution where, Richard Bailey reports, he writes: ”Emergent media owe as much to chaos theory as to evolutionary systems theory.” Amusingly, in the same post on his blog Bailey quotes from Martin Thomas’ new book Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go, in which he analyses the chaos and ambiguity of modern life. Thomas is quoted saying:

“We are witnessing the unravelling of the most fundamental building blocks of the commercial world and a collapse of faith in tight, empirical rational models and ways of thinking.”

Bailey also mentions how Grunig and Hunt’s Managing Public Relations drew on systems theory. Bailey remarks in passing that systems theory once seemed as solid as Newtonian physics – I think I’m right in supposing that here he’s referring to Newton’s dynamical systems theory, which is not the same systems theory Grunig drew on - until some new theories came along (Relativity, String Theory) to change the way we think about the world.

Well, if PRs take Fuller, Hayles, Murphy and Macnamara seriously – and I’m not claiming Richard Bailey does just because he quotes some authors – one wonders what it will do for evidence-based PR. Perhaps it means R.I.P. Burson Marsteller?

Indeed, I shall be arguing in passing in my book on PR (this dispute hardly deserves much consideration in a serious publication) that both the linear and nonlinear bods in PR circles fail to bring science to their cause. I’ll be arguing that Grunig’s theory of Excellence has as little right to claim scientific credibility as does the display of ignorance that emanates from his opponents in the asymmetrical, nonlinear postmodernist camp.

So, let’s remain grounded. The good news is that Chaos Theory, postmodernism and Jim Grunig’s model of Excellence, have very little to do with PR in the real world. PRs in the field don’t get obsessed with asymmetry and with symmetry. It is mostly a marginalized discussion among academics, because it mostly revolves around irrelevant puff. I say, long may such debates remain in the stuffy cubby holes and seminars of the Academy.

Readers interested in this issue might want to check out what some of my fellow PR bloggers have had to say about Chaos Theory recently here here and here.

Recommended further reading:

David Ruelle’s Chance and Chaos, New Science Library, 1991

Harmke Kammingen, What is This Thing called Chaos? New Left Review, 1990

(Kammingen writes “…claim that chaos theory is the new paradigm for science should, at least at this stage, be viewed with considerable caution.”)

No related pages.

My first instinct is that it is very hard to give general advice in a list of three that won’t fall apart at the first hurdle. So from the off I’m pretty convinced he’s going to make the biggest mistake of all. Error #1 being pat. In addition he made three other simplistic errors:

#2 asserting that perception always trumps reality;

#3 advocating the grovel;

#4 advocating over-reaction.

Levick says that in a crisis the first 24 hours are critical. But that’s far from always true. Plenty of proper crises unfold over days, weeks and even months. There is often nothing to be done in the first 24 hours bar trying to find out what’s going on (whilst issuing numbingly dull statements of concern).

Levick says people get (1) stuck in fear (or rather believe that they’re the good guys); (2) stuck thinking more of what they always do will work in a crisis and (3) won’t make the radical changes which are needed. These amount to firms being in denial, and sometimes that’s a problem on all the scores he mentions, I agree.

But none of these general truisms implies or validates the formula Levick advocates. In short that’s that firms at the outset of a crisis should collapse into grovel mode; throw out the good with the bad of their culture (and sort it all out overnight) and shoot anything that limps providing it’s in their own camp.

Levick rightly remarks:

“You can never underestimate how much emotion plays a part in those crisis situations, in those critical 24, 48 hours.”

While that’s often the case, one of the commonest errors in a crisis situation is to pretend those emotions can be capped at the outset by PR spin and hasty action.

Of course, sometimes an immediate dramatic reaction is exactly what is required. In groceries, an instant product recall is a great move when E.coli bacteria is suspected to have contaminated produce. But in cars, it might be the right move only after days or weeks. (Why cause unnecessary panic, which can cause its own crisis?)

In the case of strife-ridden countries, which Levick says his advice covers, the full meaning of a challenge is seldom visible within days. Events rarely require knee-jerk responses so much as considered strategies and smart tactics. To say otherwise would be to put leaders at the mercy of impressions, which change like the wind.

But let’s get one thing clear. When things explode, when people get harmed or killed, property damaged and the environment polluted, organisations had better be penitent (but listen to their lawyers too) and never arrogant. This leads me on to take a closer look at Levick’s second distorted observation:

“Well, in a crisis perception always trumps reality 100% of the time.

“And one of the things that we need to recognize is that it requires a paradigm shift. We need to think and act differently.”

The point about PR is to certainly to stress to bosses that perceptions matter, and that action may be required to create a better perception. But PR does its best work when it bends false public perception into something like alignment with reality. If all we have to offer is to tell clients to accept whatever perception the media have painted, it reveals that we are not up to our job. The Levick line implies that all the paradigm shifts are on the bosses’ side: I say that we may need paradigm shifts all over the place, and they take time.

I do agree with Levick that lots of firms are often almost as awful as it’s possible to be at managing their PR hazards. Actually, their problem is threefold: thinking about risks in order to minimise them and thinking properly about how to deal with disasters when they arise and thinking about the PR dimension of the latter.

Companies – their CEOs and boards - ought to be stress testing the worst cock-ups they can imagine. Banks ought to have assumed that their run of good luck might be a bubble, and one of their making. Even saying this reminds us that at the highest level firms tend to be in denial about the risks they face. So it’s hardly surprising that they end up in denial when things go tits-up (as I know well, nuclear core meltdowns are a classic example of an industry falling into that trap). That leads me to question the last aspect of Levick’s advice:

“The third reason are the following three words: ‘why we can’t'…. everyone has been trained and paid to avoid risk. And now you are asking what risk should we take. And every one will always come up – no matter what the opportunity is. Should we recall the product, should we get rid of that division, should we fire that individual responsible. And everyone will come up with why we can’t. Why we can’t do it for financial reasons. Why we can’t do it for company morale reasons. Why we can’t do it for legal reasons. And the end result is that the opportunity early in a crisis to make a sacrifice and to do way with the brand, or the division or the person that is the cause of the problem ends up being lost…”

Fire a person? Get rid of a division? Do away with a brand? Make a sacrifice as a way out of a dilemma? Does he really believe that in most cases in most crisis-hit bodies they should take such drastic action in the first 24 to 48 hours of a crisis? Regardless of the facts? Regardless of whether one has just cause or not for doing so? I say that’s mostly rotten advice.

Though, as I said earlier, I agree that sometimes his advice might be exactly the right thing to accept. For instance, if the causes of a crisis are transparent, remedial action is obvious, if painful, and occasionally so if only for precautionary reasons.

Yet let’s not panic. Most firms could survive either following or ignoring Levick’s advice. There’s never been a car company ruined by a product recall. There’s never been an oil company wiped out by the consequences of an accident. The truth is that most so-called crises are not crises at all, but dramas. That’s life. Nothing gets done without hazard, and cock-ups come in all flavours. Hence, I maintain that case by case, the wheels fall off generalizations when it comes to crisis management guidance. That means that organisations and their PRs have to be canny and flexible – and certainly not pat.

Related posts:

1. How PR sells firms and trust short
2. How PR Sells Firms and Trusts Short

Here’s what Mr Blatter had to say at a press conference yesterday to his critics who were calling for his re-election to be delayed:

“Football is not in a crisis, only some difficulties… If governments try to intervene then something is wrong. I think Fifa is strong enough that we can deal with our problems inside Fifa… If you see the final match of the Champions League you must applaud… We are not in a crisis. We are only in some difficulties and these will be solved inside our family.

“The executive committee of Fifa was very pleased to receive the report of the FA regarding the allegations made by Lord Triesman at the House of Commons… We were happy that we can confirm there are no elements in this report which would even prompt any proceedings.

“If somebody wants to change something in the election or in the congress of Wednesday, these are the members of Fifa… This cannot be done by the executive committee, it cannot be done by any authorities outside of Fifa – it’s only the congress itself that can do it. Congress will decide if I am a valid or non-valid candidate.”

Spoken like the bold realist and constitutionalist. Very good “stag-at-bay” stuff. I also thought Mr Blatter was brilliant to say that he wanted to sort out governance - especially on the pitch, and then in his committees. First things first, he implied.

I know: he clearly lost his rag at yesterday’s press conference. He’s an old-style Swiss apparatchik. He is sometimes prone to control-freakish outbursts when faced by a hostile crowd. His PR advisers need to drill in to him that he must keep hold of his statesman-like mask in such situations. But, overall,  it was a very good performance.

His down-to-earth frankness was admirably refreshing. He made it crystal clear that he is, at bottom, accountable to his members (call them his core stakeholders). They have procedures and methods, which he is following, for handling elections of FIFA officials. Only his members, not the media or British prime ministers or the English FA, can unseat him or set the agenda.

Mr Blatter was surely right to say that he dealt with the executive committee members the world’s countries sent him. It was, however, a politically risky remark for him to make. In an ideal world, it was a statement of truth that would have been better coming from someone else. But it wasn’t an ideal world for Mr Blatter yesterday, and I guess he couldn’t hold himself back.

The really good news is that for once the media have not re-set the main agenda; they have not been allowed to take control. Indeed, my beloved British media lacked grace and wisdom perhaps especially because they realized that they were going to lose this battle against him. They behaved liked spoiled rats robbed of a feast. I say they are in denial about the realities of the game. Anyway, it was nice, solid stuff, a glimpse behind the mask.

The truth is that football’s reputation (here I mean its popularity) does not depend on FIFA’s reputation (here I mean its squeaky-clean image) so much as on FIFA’s competence to manage big events and the game’s general affairs. The fact is that FIFA does a good job of managing both.

It is the product that’s FIFA delivers that is loved, not FIFA. And, yes, like the referee FIFA sometimes unavoidably becomes the center of attention and that’s tough.

But in the eyes of the fans, the owners of football clubs and the game’s administrators are a necessary evil. The UK has many club owners who could be considered dodgy, but their money and enthusiasm are more than welcome in the game. Anyway, our English FA hardly sets a shining example of competence that would give it any moral authority over FIFA – see here here and here.

As for sponsors such as Adidas and Coca-Cola, they are not dumb. Sponsors know all about football’s quirks. There have been no surprises. Their recent tut-tutting to journalists is humbug. It will come to nothing because the likes of Coca-Cola and Emirates need the game as much as it needs them.

Of course there may well be a case for reform. Like the EU, the UN, the Olympics and other international bodies, FIFA is a candidate for corruption and for pork barrel politics. Corruption and manoeuvres are always a risk with federal systems where the periphery sends representatives to the centre. Corruption also thrives in situations in which big money, power and reputations are at stake but where there is little scrutiny.

FIFA has a major hand in how a big pot of money is spent and where it is spent. Naturally, FIFA has many supplicants. And, yes, there’s been poor oversight by media and member countries over many years.

It is also true that the British media, which are now screaming loudest at Mr Blatter, are always more agressive than any other when they smell a story. They have a courageous history of tracking down malfeasance in their own abrupt, sometimes rude manner. They are rightly feared by plenty of international bodies which are used to a complacent press.

Still, and contrary to what the British and other media say, Mr Blatter may be exactly the man to put FIFA right, provided he understands how to get the Corporate Governance and scrutiny right in future. Of course, I’m presupposing that he is good at this job, but my gut says he is. He probably knows where the bodies are buried. Besides: one was hardly ecstatic about the main rival candidate, Qatar’s Mohamed Bin Hammam.

I don’t say he’ll make either FIFA or himself lovely or loved, but they may both survive and do pretty good work.

Here’s my parting message:

Are you listening CEOs and PR gurus in crisis-hit organisations? Mr Blatter has shown you all how to come out fighting and win by sticking up for reality and by repelling media freeloaders from taking control of his ship. He won’t be bullied no matter how big the headlines get decrying him and his organisation.

The lesson from this struggle is that firms and institutions don’t have to let the media take control of the agenda during a crisis…. all it takes to win is some PR nous and some balls.

No related pages.

I know that the worst case “media-generated scenario” for Fukushima goes on getting worse every day, nevertheless, we ought to be bold. Indeed, dammit, I’ll risk being cocky. Nuclear PR professionals – but also disinterested intelligent bystanders – need to communicate in a relaxed, mature and non-defensive tone:

• Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.
• Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.
• People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.
• Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.
• We can have it all – nukes, coal, oil, hydro, wind, wave, solar and every other alternative energy source you can envisage.

See talk tracks, proof points and soundbites below…

“Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.”

There’s no reason why nuclear spokespeople should say otherwise. They can even add that whilst science, engineering and risk analysis suggests it is extremely unlikely, the extremely unlikely will as likely as not turn into some kind of reality. But so what? Particle physics meets sod’s law, like everything else.

The point that nuclear PRs need to repeat is this: we will go on getting better at developing nuclear technology. We shall go on getting better at creating nuclear plant suited for the environment in which they are located. Fukushima is the same age of technology as Chernobyl and TMI and they provide us with lessons for the future.

“Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.”

For a few days or weeks some population (like today’s Tokyo) will face some uncertainty. The media will make it as bad as possible. Maybe that’s the point. Almost all the media have talked nonsense about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl since they happened. As the media’s eclipse of Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami victims in preference for speculation over Fukushima reveals, it’s like a disease with these people.

“People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.”

Maybe things will go wrong and they’ll face an actual higher cancer risk from nulcear power as well as today’s “merely” feared one. But the most concerned type of citizen already works hard to create increased cancer risk: they diet and jog and meditate so as to live longer. After all, longevity is their biggest cancer risk (and almost everyone else’s too), and, in the nuclear age, we are living longer lives than ever, thanks to nuclear medicine and obsessive lifestyle anxiety.

“Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.”

Regardless of Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now (with luck) Fukushima, nuclear energy has an unsurpassed safety record among the major electricity-generating sources. For instance, there have been 0.006 fatalities per GWe year of nuclear electricity produced compared to 15 times as many fatalities per GWe year for natural gas; and 1000 times as many fatalities per GWe year for coal, oil and hydropower.

Here’s a few examples for hydropower. In China around 170,000 people died when Banqiao and Shimantan burst in 1974; almost 30,000 immediately and the rest because of latent effects. A decade earlier Europe also had its fair share of similar accidents. In 1959, 400 people died in France when the Fréjus reservoir ruptured; and in 1963, 2000 died in Italy because of crumbling ground at the Vajont reservoir.

We shouldn’t forget the explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform killed 167 people in 1988. BPs recent problems must be fresh in all our minds, too.

If the scale of a potential accident rules out an industry’s right to exist, then what are we to make of Bhopal, India, in 1984? A Union Carbide chemical plant there killed three thousand people when 40 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas leaked and contaminated the surrounding environment. But we all know that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries benefits many more people than they harm.

I’m not trying to spread fear here about other energy and industrial sources. All energy is bottled force. The entire energy industry has mostly handled its controlled release responsibly. But the evidence suggests that nuclear technology is low risk. Windscale killed nobody. Three Mile Island killed nobody and left no measurable long-term carcinogenic risks in its wake.

Meanwhile, we should remind the world that the Chernobyl accident killed around 50 people in 1986. Most of its exclusion zone is now being dismantled and being re-settled and farmed again safely. Though as many as 9, 000 people (4, 000 of those among the 6 million most affected population) might die a slightly premature death from Chernobyl-related cancers. However not only is that worst-case outcome unlikely, we shall never know because that statistic cannot be measured among the many millions of people it encompasses.

The biggest risk from nuclear energy is people’s fear of it. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, unfounded fear and anxiety was the most damaging consequence of the accident investigators could discover (see here for a full interrogation of Chernobyl’s death toll). But that fear is something the media helps generate.

Hence, the media also must learn from its past mistakes. It, too, must face up to its responsibility to protect the public. A little less hype and scaremongering over Fukushima would make a most welcome start. The next step would be to have an honest debate about risk and energy policy. That’s something nuclear PR can help facilitate.

“We can have it all.”

However, we can have nearly everything: nuclear (with the odd calamity); oil and gas (with more frequent calamities; bought from dictators and religious fundamentalists); solar (might become seriously lovable and economic quite soon); wind (not always, and not where you’d like it); hydro (big hazards; plenty of enemies); conservation (if we can be bothered to live like cavemen). It’s all possible, and all has real risk or drawback, including (variously) fear, guilt, patience, or tedium. Which do we prefer? Which most solves the global warming problem?

Well, clearly nuclear energy has fewer greenhouses gases than coal, oil and gas. Green alternative energy sources provide far from proven technological solutions, at greater cost than nuclear energy. Moreover they have to yet to show that they are adequate to the task of replacing coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy. The least risky route of all would be if our governments hedged their bets and adopted a mixed bag of solutions (read all of the above).

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1. Media suffers a Fukushima meltdown

Clearly, the pictures of the reactor building’s side walls and ceiling exploding that we all saw live on TV were startling. But it was obviously not a nuclear explosion. As Malcolm Grimston, associate fellow at Chatham House in London, remarked:

“Thankfully, although the explosion was spectacular, it wasn’t devastating and it seems the force was not sufficient to breach the reactor’s metal shell.”

Of course, the authorities in Japan rightly evacuated around 170 000 people from a twenty kilometer radius from the plant. But that was a precautionary move, not one born out of panic. There was some mildly radioactive steam and or hydrogen that needed venting from the plant. It was wise to remove people from its vicinity while the gas dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere.

To put all this in perspective, the authorities have rated the incident so far at 4 on the 0-7 international scale of severity. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was rated 7, with the official death toll being just under 50, though as many as 4,000 could die eventually as a consequence of that accident. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident was rated 5. Notably in that case nobody was killed or seriously injured, and no long term health consequences are expected.

Sure, the recent earthquake and Tsunami have pushed the safety defences at Fukushima to the limit. We don’t know yet whether the two troubled reactor cores at Fukushima “merely” suffered fuel damage, a partial meltdown or the near full meltdown that occurred at Three Mile Island. But we can say with some certainty that that lack of knowledge is not that important. It took years before we knew the full extent of the meltdown at Three Mile Island. That’s because it is not possible to poke one’s head, or even a camera, into the reactor core until it cools down and the radiation levels allow it.

There is something very credible and laudable about Japan’s safety-first nuclear culture at work in Fukushima. They have flooded their reactors with seawater – which effectively destroys them – to make 100% sure that they cool down harmlessly; the main threat being hydrogen and steam explosions caused by the reactor’s heat.

The picture emerging from Fukushima is “reassuring”. The onsite and offsite consequences – no deaths and just a few injuries and some dispersal of mildly radioactive gas – have been limited. That’s what a safety case and the regulatory authorities demand from a nuclear plant’s in-depth multi-layered defences.

It is my view, that the Japanese handling of this nuclear incident at Fukushima - whether they made mistakes or not – will validate the safety case for old nukes.

So there’s something very skewed, overblown even, about the media’s reporting on Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami disasters: we know there are tens of thousands of people dead, hundreds of thousands more homeless or stranded, yet everybody is talking excessively about a troubled nuclear plant that has not and most likely will not kill anybody.

However the media were playing up to stereotypes over Japan’s nuclear troubles. There’s a rich history associated with nuclear scaremongering, not least because the public has an appetite for horror stories. At Three Mile Island in 1979 the meltdown occurred at the outset of the shutdown. The media and politicians then spent weeks terrorizing the world as they speculated about the terrible impact of a meltdown that had been so undramatic that nobody noticed it had happened already with little consequence.

As I have reported extensively on this online review, while Chernobyl was an horrific disaster, it was no where near as bad as the doom-mongers claimed – see here here and here.

So the western nuclear industry now has a major PR challenge on its hands. The challenge will be to convince the world that core meltdowns do happen and that the evidence shows that they don’t matter much (Chernobyl being a unique case). That calls for some straight and upfront risk management communication, one that can show that new nukes are even more reassuringly safe than old ones.

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To satisfy that interest, over the next few months (the 25th anniversary of the disaster is on April 26) I shall share what I’ve learned from my time at Chernobyl and the rest of my 20 years as a PR putting the record straight. There’s much to say. Not only will Chernobyl NPP and its exclusion zones become major tourist attractions this year, the industry is set for a modest global recovery. But I’ll come back to all that. Meanwhile, here’s some pictures highlighting Chernobyl’s iconic status taken (by Richard D North) on a trip I organised in 2006:

A birth defect attributed to Chernobyl (perhaps wrongly): Chernobyl Museum, Kiev

Farm horse in Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone

Chernobyl village abandoned house

Slavutych Hospital: in the new town built after the disaster

A birth defect attributed to Chernobyl (perhaps wrongly): Chernobyl Museum, Kiev

Pripyat: the abandoned City that once housed 30 000

Refuseniks Farming illegally in Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone river...

Chernobyl Reactor 4 after it blew its top (this is not by RDN)

The half-completed Unit 5: frozen as was in 1986

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station Canteen, 2006

Model of Inside of Exploded Reactor 4

Abandoned Exclusion Zone house

Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Manager, Mr. Gramotkin, 2006

The Sarcophagus, 2006

Chernobyl NPP Undamaged Reactor, 2006

Shop at Chernobyl Village serving liquidators and refuseniks

Inside Chernobyl NPP, 2006

Chernobyl Office Interior, 2006

Fire fighting exhibit Chernobyl Museum Kiev

Slavutych: where Chernobyl's staff live today

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There was no upside to HP’s reputation from ridding itself of Mark Hurd. The Economist described HP as Hurdless chickens. Wall Street pulled the rug on the share price. Shareholders looked on bewildered as, as the FT reports, transparency turned to opacity as the Board lost its nerve. Now let’s review how this might make a movie.

Married and slightly nerdy CEO gets obsessed with an events contractor, B-movie actress and former soft-porn star. He buys her dinner more times than he ought. She claims she was sexually harassed and hires a top lawyer with a nose for publicity.

The CEO gets cleared of the charge by the company. But he has difficulty explaining the more than $10k (perhaps $20k) he claimed on expenses to entertain her. He gets told to jump ship. As a result, HP’s share value drops by around $13 billion. That would be the opening scene. Then would come the flashback.

Mark Hurd’s predecessor knocks billions off HP’s share price after her fraught merger with Compaq proves nigh on disastrous. The Board that once backed Carly Fiorina decides to ditch her, but the news leaks. Yet only fellow Board members were in the know. So she orders private detectives to spy on the Board to uncover the traitor. Before they can report, Carly’s fired.

However, the chairman of the Board continues with the investigation (widened to include senior executives), which stoops to lies and deceit and unethical borderline legality. When the rest of the Board discovers how the culprit was identified, members resign in protest and the chairman is forced out. From then on, whenever somebody knocks on their front door, they fear that they’re being bugged by a colleague (the film would portray their spouses’ paranoia).

Carly’s merger antics alone mean that from day one, Mark Hurd is CEO of a company with a psychologically damaged and neurotic Board. The breaking of the spying story and near-implosion of the Board, just deepen his problems. But against the odds, he restores HP’s fortunes, winning widespread praise for the turnaround.

To top it all the temptress in the story proves to have a heart (surely that’s a heart on her sleeve?). She weeps and says she never wanted him fired. She backs up his defence and says that they never had intercourse. The audience weeps with her on behalf of their fallen hero.

What can we learn from this mess?

Above all, the scandal at HP is more about a failure of corporate governance, team-building and trust, than it is about Mark Hurd’s peccadilloes. The major issue for the Board was trust, and the issue of Hurd’s seemingly falsified expenses.

Contrary to popular opinion, corporate governance is not about CSR and personal ethics so much as about improving corporate performance. It is about making the right operational choices. It is about protecting shareholder interests and about assessing strategies to ensure that corporate assets are used properly to achieve corporate purposes. As Larry Ellison has pointed out, HP’s Board has clearly failed to do its job.

The PR consultants at APCO recommended, rightly, that the Board should proactively make a full disclosure of the “scandal”. However, they wrongly advised that Hurd should be sent packing. They produced mock scandalous headlines of what the media might say if Hurd was not ousted. This scared the risk-adverse, emotional Board. In APCO’s favour, however, they probably knew better than anyone else just how broken were the internal relations at the top of HP (leadership requires trust to function). This was no ordinary crisis.

The Board was like a rabbit caught in headlights. It first froze, then panicked. Not for the first time it collectively put personal feelings before the company’s interests.

Meanwhile, Wall Street punished the Board and the company for firing Hurd.

But what about Mark Hurd’s role in all this? His comment about his resignation (cue $40 million pay off) was revealing. He said:

“I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust and integrity that I have espoused at HP”

So, he knew that he broke the bonds of trust at HP, and that he was guilty of hypocrisy on the morality front. So here’s my guidelines for how to avoid such moral hazards in future:

• Don’t let PRs sell the politically correct narrative of your personal life.

• Don’t use personal virtues as a shield to promote your professional ones.

• Headlines about your personal virtues are hostages to fortune.

• Avoid the temptation to indulge in moral outbursts on any topic.

• Don’t bring your personal life to work or include it in your PR.

• Those who live by the sword die by it.

• Don’t lecture anyone (especially not your staff) about personal morality.

• Always assume that everything always gets into the media in the end.

• The public love sinners and winners. It loathes saints.

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She was out and about in Florida. She was there sending out reassuring PR messages to tourists. She told them not to abandon the Gulf Coast, in other words not to believe all the environmental catastrophe talk they’d been hearing on the news. She reminded the world that:

“There are still thousands of miles of beaches not touched by the spill. There are still opportunities to experience these beautiful beaches,”

She added:

“… folks here in Florida and across the Gulf Coast are still depending on visitors and tourist dollars to put food on their tables and to pay their mortgages and to send their kids to college.

Talking of paying bills. A local restaurant owner by the name of Patronis told the First Lady that oysters were off the seafood menu, not because they weren’t available but because “all the oystermen are working for BP,” leaving few men to scrape the oysters from nearby Apalachicola Bay.

Thank God for Mrs Obama and for the local tourist lobby who briefed her well. Her words couldn’t have been better timed, coming as they did as BP finally – we hope – plugged its deep-sea leaking oil pipe. If all goes well, by August the relief oil wells will have sealed the leak permanently. I predict that we will all be shocked by just how quickly the environment and BP’s reputation recovers.

Of course, my message, and I’m sure Mrs Obama’s message likewise, is not that environmental harm has not been done. The message is simply to keep it all in perspective.

This little incident highlights the power of competing PR agendas. There’s been a lot invested by environmentalists and politicians – not least Mrs Obama’s husband – in traducing BP over this spill. But the criticism was hyped and bordered on scaremongering. That had consequences far beyond BP.

Actually, early on in this crisis, President Obama also found himself stressing how lovely and open most of the Gulf beaches were. His remarks then, even more than Mrs Obama’s now, remind us that catastrophism is a very dangerous weapon. Being doomy is great when you’re trying to deflect blame and raise the stakes, but it’s less good when real hoteliers, for instance, get side-swiped as collateral damage.

The trouble is that it is hundreds of times easier to spread ideas, impressions and images of damage – and make them seem widespread, severe and permanent – than it is to remind people of a nuanced picture. This is an important effect of the media, which is much more the politician’s tool than reality is. The media can make one oiled pelican stand for all nature and for every pelican. Reporters can easily go to the most damaged spot and make it stand for the generality of damage, and make damage seem general.

Anyway, after a few months of uncertainty, noise and safe exaggeration, perhaps Mrs Obama’s remarks will see the beginning of a subtler picture. Of course, we have yet to see what the real damage of the spill is. We’ll know much better about a year from now.  Let’s hope Louisiana has thriving seaside and wildlife tourism between now and then and long after.

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BP is on a knife-edge. They can’t seem attractive (and suitably penitent) whilst blaming others, and yet they are not alone in causing the accident in the Gulf. (Leave aside that they’ve got a gaffe-prone CEO who says that he wants things to go well because “I’d like my life back”. A severe shortage of pre-accident media training there, I fear.)

But in time – and that time isn’t yet, not by a long chalk – BP may well find itself able and required to discuss (first in private with sympathetic mature journalists and opinion-formers) where other parcels of blame lie.

It may well be that Transocean or Halliburton or others are culpable in some degree, perhaps even greatly. But how about those nice regulators who are the thin line between corporate greed and the fragile public and planet?

I am pretty sure that if there’s blame to be spread, the regulator is as much at fault (or as innocent) as BP or other firms. Indeed, I am inclined to think that the regulator is more to blame based on what I’ve learned from the circumstances behind all of the disasters I’ve ever studied. I’ll return to this another time, but from Titanic to Three Mile Island, I’m struck by how technological failure has flowed from regulatory failure rather than greed. I mean that very often – most often – the private sector fails when the public sector thinks it’s doing fine and has signed-off on its behaviour. (The modern financial failures are examples of this, by the way.)

So I reason that it was more the regulator’s job to drive, own, the “what-if” process than BP’s. It isn’t exactly BP’s job to be gungho and alpha-male. But, certainly, in the modern highly-regulated and accountable world the corporation is in a proper and allowed tension with its regulators. Indeed, I hold the view that regulators are rather feeble in hardly ever accepting a proper share of responsibility.

Unless BP has purposely pulled the wool over our eyes, something I doubt, or didn’t carry out its agreed obligations, which remains possible, I think BP ought to be cut a good deal more slack than it actually will be.

It looks likely that BP was operating in the Gulf of Mexico at the edge of technology’s capabilities in a high risk environment. (Krauthammer in the Washington Post argues that’s because of green prejudice, a nice argument I won’t pursue.) If it turns out that BP’s bad luck was to have an accident that no regulator or operator on earth had made allowances for then BP has the makings of a sound defence.  Though, paradoxically, even if that’s proven true, that’s an argument which can’t be pressed too loudly in polite society without risking a backlash.

There’s little doubt, then, that the blame will stick with the corporations (it may widen from BP as Shell fears here). That’s not least because regulators and the politicians will wriggle out of it and the media will prefer to hound BP and the other corporations to hounding the regulators and governments. That’s unless, and I’m dreaming here, the balance of third party opinion comes down on BP’s side.

I am almost sure – and far from happy about it because I believe BP should say what it knows or believes to be true – that there is very little BP can say today credibly in public. It cannot exonerate itself to any degree without appearing to avoid responsibility. It is up against quite deep human prejudices and tastes.

People love disaster and villainy. That’s why certain accidents have had mythic narrative power which no amount of good evidence can shift.  The Titanic, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez, are powerful cases where the very names have stuck emblematically in our minds. Their very mention comes with the clutter of preconceived ideas about class, capitalism, corporations, technological over-reach. BP will, presumably, now join that list. Like the others, it will probably be a good example of an operation which went on to do good work whilst exploiting plenty more technology. But it will serve as an example of bad-intentions and hubris.

It is just possible that this event will sink BP. But that would make it truly unique (even the owners of the Titanic didn’t go under).

Away from the hype, the financial market will look at this issue in a wholly cash manner. What will the accident cost? Will BP face difficulty getting US or other licences? Yes, this might well be a transformative event for the entire petroleum industry. But the market may think that BP is becoming case-hardened in a big-time way.

Therefore the outcome of the whole affair provides BP with an opportunity to take pole-position in the battle to reshape the industry’s worldwide image. After all, the world remains as dependent as ever on petroleum, so there’s a lot of mutual self-interest out there. There’s also a lot of cognitive dissonance. Plenty of firms feel forced to align their reputations with tragedies, real and very often imagined, as if they were responsible for them, but still do good business regardless. Some of my colleagues – cynically, perhaps – call that hit on the company’s reputation the price of securing a licence to operate.

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