How To Get Tuition Free PR Education By Learning From The Impeachment Proceedings
(Author’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of occasional political columns that I’ll be writing for CommPRO.biz until Inauguration Day, January 20. Previously, I wrote 17 political columns leading up to Election Day. FYI – My first public relations job was with a political firm, where I worked on local, statewide and presidential campaigns. In this column, I write on why the impeachment hearings of President Trump provided many PR lessons not taught in communications schools.)
Arthur Solomon
I never went to journalism school. I learned the craft the old fashioned way, by reading tons of non-fiction historical books, augmented by novels and reading all the sections of more than a half-dozen daily newspapers each day. Doing that educated me to the many different writing styles of journalists.
I never went to PR school. I did go to a university but majored in English, and minored in history and philosophy, because I thought doing so would introduce me to styles of writing and thinking unknown to me. I also took a few journalism classes, never a PR class; none were on the curriculum.
While I believe that a formal education should be a requirement for anyone in our field, because it broadens one’s thinking, especially if they take liberal arts programs and minimize business courses like PR and journalism, there’s no education like actually “doing it,” as I did, tuition free, when I landed my first PR job because the agency also published a weekly newspaper and I had been editor of my college newspaper.
It was with a political firm, and for several months I was assigned to editing the weekly newspaper and reviewing and suggesting changes to press releases before slowly transitioning, during the political campaign, to work on local, statewide and national campaigns, including presidential ones. (Indeed, I interfaced a few times with a presidential candidate who was elected, once when he was vice president and agreed to do a photo op with members of a visiting Israeli soccer team during a “Salute To Israel” event, the other times on the campaign trail. I also worked a few years on PR efforts for a member of Congress. Ever since I have told novice PR people to pay attention to the political scene because there are techniques that can be transferred to non-political accounts.
President Trump’s and his administration’s inept handling of three major PR crises in 2020 can fill the pages of a huge PR text book. They are his mishandling of the coronavirus, his response to losing the election and what transpired during the president’s impeachment hearings.
His mishandling of the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. and his reaction to losing the election has been covered in previous articles. The impeachment is the subject of this one.
There were major lessons from the House impeachment inquiries and Senate trial of President Trump that exposed a major flaw in the White House’s communications skills and thinking that were fodder for the Democratic House managers: Five of the most important were 1) the Republicans didn’t know how to limit controversial subjects to only a few people, 2) they expected staffers to participate in a cover-up, 3) they thought that email conversations would always be private, 4) they believed that everyone working for the administration would always be loyal to the president, and 5) the White House called all who testified before Congress or made statements he didn’t like “liars’, resulting in additional negative press coverage for the president. (This last point played out again recently when President Trump fired Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, for saying that the 2020 election was the most secure ever. As a result, Krebs comments gained significantly more news coverage than it would have had the president kept mum, highlighted by a segment on “60 Minutes” on November 29 that also received news coverage prior to and after its broadcast.)
Other important lessons that PR people could have learned by paying close attention to the impeachment hearings were:
- Never make a statement that might come back to bite you if you have to change positions in the future. GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham ignored this rule. Videotape surfaced and was televised nationally of him saying one thing when he was a GOP House manager during the impeachment trial of President Clinton, and reversing his position now that Trump is on trial.
- Never assume that you know how a team member will act during an investigation of a PR crisis.
- Perhaps the most important lesson that PR people should remember is to never lie about your work to investigators. The truth invariably comes out.
Although it’s unlikely that the great majority of PR practitioners will have information that can influence national policy, sensitive or confidential client information should be protected. The use of emails, in particular, should be restricted. Never email anything that a client says is confidential to others in your agency. Walk it over to members of your team. If you have to relay the information to other offices, don’t do it via office phones or smart phones. Overnight the information.
Confidentiality regarding PR plans is often ignored, especially by young practitioners. Too often young PR practitioners are so proud of their contributions to client programs that I’ve heard them discussed while they were unwinding at the bar.
Because of my political PR agency experience, the importance of keeping sensitive information secret was ingrained into my DNA. Not doing so can be disastrous to people in our business.
I once traveled by airplane to a client meeting to unveil a new program. When we were done with the presentation, our client said he was instructed by a top corporate marketing executive not to let us leave until we were questioned by the exec. What had happened was that we were on the same airplane with the marketing exec and an advertising team from another agency that was presenting their plans for a new product rollout. The ad team was discussing their plans on the plane, just one row ahead of the marketing exec. We were told that three different agencies were presenting that afternoon and the exec didn’t know which team was from the ad agency. When it was our turn to be questioned, we were told what happened, received an apology for detaining us and were told the penalty for discussing client information in public was to lose the account, which the ad agency did.
In addition to PR lessons learned from the impeachment proceedings of President Trump, there were many other lessons that PR people should have learned if they paid attention to the 2020 political scene. Perhaps the most important one has been practiced ever since there was a political campaign: Don’t be stymied by old and hackneyed PR tenets. The best way of doing this is to throw away the old PR school books, which contains tenets dating back to Methuselah, and create new strategies to meet your client’s needs.
No matter what you think of President Trump, he did so in 2015 and 2016 and got elected president. Unfortunately for him he also acted like many PR people do: They think just because they have an impressive title, they are the smartest person in the room. Doing so, led to his defeat by Joe Biden, who Trump considered much less intelligent than himself. He probably still does; egotists always think they are the smartest, even when events prove them wrong. Then they invent excuses.
PR people are often told to think like a newsperson. They should also think like a political operative when dealing with the press.
About the Author: Arthur Solomon, a former journalist, was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, and was responsible for restructuring, managing and playing key roles in significant national and international sports and non-sports programs. He now is a frequent contributor to public relations publications, consults on public relations projects and is on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at arthursolomon4pr@juno.com or artsolomon4pr@optimum.net.
