Learning from Prince Andrew's PR Disaster

Communications professionals rarely appear in movies. When they do, journalists are the heroes and PR pros the zeros. Netflix’s “Scoop” offers a more nuanced view, but still largely sticks to the script. 

Agency professionals will likely have taken some measure of schadenfreude in the film when the PR consultant steps down because Prince Andrew’s private secretary decides to go against his advice and schedules an interview with the BBC news program, “Newsnight.” (Think “60 Minutes” for U.S. context.)    

Corporate communications professionals may, depending on their background, have some sympathy for Andrew’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk. Thirsk, tired of following the basic advice of meeting and building relationships with journalists, chooses to set up the infamous interview that contributed to the ended of her and Prince Andrew’s royal careers.

Casting blame on Thirsk is easy in hindsight. Too easy. And, not particularly productive.  

As a former head of corporate communications, I believe the most significant takeaway is the impact of personal and organizational dynamics on the decision-making process. 

Thirsk is portrayed as having a protective and hagiographic perspective of Prince Andrew as a war hero loyal to his friends. This distorts her sense of how the outside world should see him. In the film, she believes if he could tell his story, others would understand and get to know the man she knows. It’s also clear that Andrew, in his royal bubble, is completely disconnected from reality.      

In a corporate context, leaders often fall into the same trap, “If only audiences better understood what we are doing, and why it is so important and different, we’d be more successful.” The fallacy is to look at issues as simply communications rather than business problems. At times, as with Prince Andrew, the business end of the problem (associating with a known sex trafficker of underage girls) is not something communications can fix.   

In my career, the most glaring example of this was a CEO (under pressure) coming to an offsite meeting with a copy of his bio and telling the communications team that all we had to do was help journalists understand his accomplishments. He resigned the next day.        

In any organization where hierarchy and over-deference to leaders is the rule (the monarchy being the apogee), the risk is that the people whose job it is to tell communications truths may either be discouraged from doing so or find themselves faltering in their responsibility.  

I’ve been in a Scoop-like situation. It started with my boss asking my team to manage an interview and me surfing through the experience, until the wave crashed and recriminations began. Personal and organizational dynamics contributed to the failure, including mine, to stop the bus and look at the situation critically. Despite the best of intentions, we may all find ourselves in situations that lead to poor decision-making. We need to learn from them. 

Agency professionals are not immune. One of the biggest challenges is how to say no if a client is pushing a Panglossian storyline. When money and careers are on the line, the incentive to go with the flow is very strong. In “Scoop,” kudos to the counselor for walking away. But we are left with a sense of whether he could have been more effective in building a relationship, where resigning was not the solution.  

The Prince Andrew story highlights traps we can fall into as individuals and the impact of organizational dynamics on decision-making. These are both fixable issues. 

Taking off the rose-colored glasses and being as dispassionate about a situation is essential. While we do need to care deeply about our companies (or agencies), we can’t lose perspective. Companies encourage brand evangelism, but as communicators we need to see our client’s organization as others do if we are to make the best decisions for it. 

Fixing organizational dynamics requires leaders to seek a diversity of opinions and for team members to be confident they can speak up. Fostering a culture where communicators can “learn forward” is key to leaning into the opportunity of media engagement, while carefully and critically managing risk. 

Scoop should remind us that hubris, over-optimism, hierarchy, deference to authority, not understanding audience perspective, and having an unrealistic expectation of the power of communication to address fundamental problems, are some of the issues we need to be mindful about if we are to avoid early ends to our careers.