As I write this, Anthony Weiner has just resigned his seat in the United States Congress, and it can hopefully be said that our (not very) long national obsession with Mr. Weiner and his Twitter account is coming to an end. When a national personality flames out as spectacularly as Mr. Weiner has, there are always lessons leaders can learn—and nearly always, those lessons are in the area of communication. This case study is no exception.
Mr. Weiner’s biggest failure is one that is extremely common, perhaps universal, when political scandal occurs. He failed to observe the very first rule of communications in a crisis: provide reporters, and by extension the public, with the facts, as quickly as they are known. In this case, the former Congressman knew all the facts as soon as the issue surfaced. Instead of admitting his responsibility and beginning a course of therapy, as he ended up having to do, he kept the story alive through increasingly impossible-to-believe prevarications. Once people know you’ve lied to them, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to regain their trust—which is why people are still digging for more dirt on Mr. Weiner.
It is very true that in many scandals, the phrase “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” applies. Providing the facts as quickly as they are known has other advantages, however—it enables you to fight another day, and eventually to win, because the truth is on your side. It allows you to defend yourself in the court of public opinion instead of retreating (as Weiner briefly did) into the evasive netherworld of “no comment.” And it allows you to make rapid and truthful corrections, even of your own previous statements. In my experience, the initial story always changes some in any crisis. New information is learned, new explanations develop, and what seemed to be the whole story turns out to be, at best, only partially correct. If you’ve been honest with the public, and stuck to the facts, they will generally accept that your understanding has changed. If not, they won’t.
There is, however, another lesson even the best communicators can learn from Mr. Weiner’s difficulties, and that is that the ever-increasing velocity of what has been called the “24-hour news cycle” has taken another quantum leap forward, thanks to Twitter. Much has been made of the changes cable news and internet news sources have made to the speed of information delivery. There is now a constant need to fill pages of untold numbers of news outlets with information, and endless numbers of would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins trying to break the next Watergate scandal. Some are smart and informed, others are not: some are extremely ethical, others less so. But nearly all of them now have Twitter accounts, and now provide regular comments on the news of the day in the 140-character constraint the format requires. Mature and sober reflection, even among columnists paid to provide that kind of perspective, may soon be a thing of the past.
This additional compression of the news cycle will make the task of communication specialists (or public relations people, for those not up with the current lingo) even more important. It’s still a bad idea to speak before facts become known—but since whatever information is provided will be chewed on rapidly and endlessly, it becomes more important to have your facts right, and presented properly, as quickly as possible.
Spokespersons with experience in dealing with the news media are any organization’s best bet for getting its story told quickly and accurately—but leaders should be trained in the art of public speaking and media relations as well, because the public’s demands for accountability usually requires them to eventually ‘face the music’ themselves. It may be too late for Congressman Weiner, but it is not too late for others to learn how to communicate in a crisis. It’s an important skill—one that leaders must be taught before an emergency takes place, not on the fly, in order to be effective.
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