The Mail breaks its media protocol, with dire consequences

The Daily Mail’s hatchet job on Ralph Miliband has been the big political story this week and included a fascinating duel between Alastair Campbell and the newspaper's deputy editor Jon Steafel.

I thought I’d write a quick summary of the PR tactics in play in this interview as I always find it fascinating to see how newspaper journalists perform when dragged into a live studio to answer questions.

Now it’s unusual for a senior Fleet St editor to submit to a live TV interview about a contentious story. I understand that the Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, has a policy of not defending his newspaper’s output in public media fora.

But curiously, this week, the Mail made an exception and despatched Steafel to fight the Mail’s corner against Campbell.

If you haven’t seen it already, the interview is here:

Now superficially Steafel comes across well, he’s calm and eloquent, he’s not a swivel-eyed loon nor an addled old hack. Indeed his appearance was later applauded by Campbell, although I’d take that with a pinch of salt if I was Steafel.

But you do have to question what the Mail was hoping to achieve with this piece of media engagement, why did they choose to break with their policy of refusing to appear on media programs to defend their output? Was it ever a formal policy, or just a rule of thumb. You also have to wonder what, if any, preparation was done. You see it's difficult to discern what proactive message the Mail was hoping to send by taking part in this interrogation.

To my mind in this interview Staefel commits the error of continuing to think like a journalist. He does this without appearing to realise that:

• He/his publication has lost control of the story; and / or
• He/his publication has become the story.

The latter point is crucial and should have had implications for how the Mail dealt with the story.

Note to Steafel: if you’ve allowed yourself to be dragged from your newsroom for interrogation in a BBC studio then YOU have become the story.

Staefel allows the Newsnight interviewer to set the tone and politely responds to her framing of the issues. None of which puts the Mail in a particularly good light, it all amounts to a poor, defensive re-statement of the crap the Mail has already published. There’s nothing new here, Staefel stakes no new ground for the Mail and offers merely a defensive justification of the original offending piece, his responses amount to this:

• We examined Ralph Miliband’s views;
• His views are wrong, they are anti-British;
• Ralph Miliband was a Marxist, Marxists are responsible for thousands of deaths, this means he was dangerous / evil (in itself a vulgar and despicable argument);
• Ralph MIliband hated Britain;
• This is all fair comment;
• WE STAND BY OUR STORY.

But this isn’t credible.

If the Mail stood by its story, then why did it feel the need to break with its no-comment policy and agree to be interrogated on live TV? And once he did agree to appear on Newsnight why didn’t Staefel ‘spin’ such an unusual step?

Lines to take such as:

‘Look we recognize this story has caused a big stir… we don’t usually comment on these things… but here we are being accountable…. How many other newspaper editors would do this?...’

In addition, could the Mail have taken steps to acknowledge some of the problems with the story? Take the tasteless ‘grave Socialist’ picture for example. The newspaper had already removed this image from its website, in apparent recognition that it had committed an error of taste. Staefel could've deployed this as one of his key messages:

Again:

‘Look we are reasonable people… we do listen and when we get it wrong we put it right.’

Of course this is not the impression that comes out of the interview, instead one gets the impression of a newspaper forced to remove material against its will. These are just a few random thoughts, none of them trumping arguments.

The point is this: In any circumstances (whether inauspicious or not) if you opt to rip up your media engagement policy and go ahead with an interview, then you better have done some planning. You need to be clear why you’re breaking cover, you need to know your messages and show iron discipline in sticking to them.

The whole thing is pretty easy for Alistair Campbell. His strategy is to decapitate the Mail’s messaging (such as it is) by destroying the foundations of the Mail’s credibility at source. He barely engages with the content of the Mail’s story. Instead he attacks the Mail as an institution, smears its reputation, he cynically speculates about the cowardliness of the Mail’s editor (himself conspicuously absent from the Newsnight studio). In adopting this strategy he successfully puts into focus the Mail’s credibility. Furthermore, he gets traction for the idea that the Mail is a poisonous, corrupting and dangerous influence. He comprehensively undermines the Mail’s ability to get its message across.

Now this tactic is not new, and nor is it limited to spin doctoring.

Campbell was famously accused of adopting a similar strategy during the Iraq War by deflecting questions about the government’s conduct via a manufactured attack on the BBC. Although, perhaps not as clear cut as this week’s attack on the Mail, it’s worth re-watching Campbell’s now infamous intervention on Channel 4 News back in 2003.

But anyway, enough of this PR nonsense.

Could the Mail have handled itself better? Of course. Was it ever likely to? Probably not. I personally take great joy in covering up the Mail with copies of the Mirror (or if lucky, the Morning Star) whenever I see it in a shop. I also regularly admonish strangers for buying it.

Despite some good moments (it's role in the Stephen Lawrence case??) it's difficult to see any good in the Mail's relentlessly poisonous output. 

Framing the media debate: 'the mess Labour left' (1/2)

He still divides opinion but Alistair Campbell, former Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street, is worth listening to right now on the issue of Labour Party comms strategy.

This interviewin the Independent is a good example. Ostensibly the piece is about his efforts to raise awareness about alcoholism, but in it he also criticises the Labour Party’s failure to rebut coalition ‘lies’ about the economy. He makes a similar point in an interview with Decca Aikenhead here and in his own blog here, and here.

Labour’s poor comms record in this parliament started when they lost the 2010 election. As the coalition whipped up a faux national economic emergency, the Labour Party went to ground. Rather than rebutting the coalition's framing of the ongoing financial crisis as ‘a mess left by Labour’ they retreated, opting for a long drawn-out debate about which Miliband brother should lead it. Regardless of how important it was to elect a new leader, it was a massive tactical error not to vigorously contest the way the economy was framed. Although it might have been excusable had the party subsequently recovered from it.

In truth the error set the foundations for a blitzkrieg on Labour’s legacy (I remember those noughties op-ed pieces that proclaimed how Blair and Brown had decisively re-framed the debate about public service investment). And it has made it all the more easy for the coalition, with a metaphorical straight-face, to make so much noise about what amounts to a few per cent economic growth in three years. 

As one economist put it recently

you could close down the economy for a year. The next year economic growth would be fantastic. [But] only a fool would argue that this showed that closing down the economy for a year was a great idea.

(As an aside I think the metaphor of 'closing down' is interesting. Could it have have been used by Labour to re-frame the debate about austerity?)

Anyway, back to Alistair Campbell. In a piece from June he shone some light on his approach to PR consultancy (Donkey passim). The piece was adapted from a Powerpoint presentation given in Australia and its intended audience was business people, not the Labour Party (Context is important here because I don’t want to ‘spin’ Alistair Campbell). In it he blogged about how important it was for key decision-makers, in any organisation, to be in total agreement about organizational strategy and objectives as a prerequisite to successful PR.

Speaking to his assembled audience of business leaders he said: 

If you are not aligned on strategy, you, the key people running the show, [then] why should the public be expected to know and hear what you are trying to say or sell to them? And why should the media not take every chance it can to make your life more difficult, pore over your errors, ignore your successes?

And here I will introduce a thought experiment. Let's suppose Alistair Campbell was in the market for a job heading up Labour Party's comms for the 2015 general election. Were he to accept such a hypothetical job offer from Ed Miliband, one can only assume that he would be banging the table and repeating the mantra that decision-makers who are not aligned on strategy have something far worse than a PR problem, they have a ‘reality problem’.

Are Ed Miliband and Ed Balls out of alignment on the key messages relating to Labour's economic track record? Campbell is on the record as believing that Labour can successfully rebut the ‘mess Labour left’ line, but he says that certain people in the Labour Party won’t go there. And though it would be tantalizing to know who in the Labour hierarchy is blocking this rebuttal, a focus on individual personalities probably misses the point.

The universal PR point that we can take from Campbell’s blog piece is that only when key decision makers are on the same page in terms of objectives and strategy, is it possible to get a foot in the ring. I infer from this that, on the issue of Labour’s economic record, the key party decision-makers are out of alignment.

I’d be interested to know how Campbell thinks it possible for Labour to turn the tide on this 18 months from a general election. He seems to think it is possible, arguing that Labour should rebut the coalition line. The problem is that frankly, in 2013, such a rebuttal would be more than three years too late. In fact it should have been made - with iron discipline - every day since Labour lost the 2010 election.

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‘You haven’t got a PR problem, you’ve got a reality problem.’

Enjoyed this presentation by AlistairCampbell. He neatly puts his finger on the disconnect between the unrealistic hopes of company execs and the real world outcomes of PR.

‘I get calls from people out of the blue… But when a government or company or a big brand comes on, I always assume two things – 1, they have a problem; and 2, they think it is about the communications. They think they need a spin doctor.
So I go and see them and the first thing I do is say: “who are your key people?” and I ask to see them too, at the same time. And I get out some plain white postcards. And on each one is written the words: "The main objective of our organization is …"
‘And I ask them to end that sentence. Then I ask them to turn over the postcard, and it says:"The strategy to meet our objective is …"
‘And I ask them to fill that out too. Then I gather them in. And nine times out of ten, I gather in a stack of different objectives, strategies which are tactics, or strategies which are objectives, and I say to them… you don’t have a spin problem, you have a reality problem. 'If you are not aligned on strategy, you, the key people running the show, why should the public be expected to know and hear what you are trying to say or sell to them? And why should the media not take every chance it can to make your life more difficult, pore over your errors, ignore your successes?”

Of course he’s right. It’s probably the most frustrating thing that PRs have to deal with, the immanent failure of executives to integrate PR into all their work, instead to see it as a post-facto magic wand.

But how many other lowly PRs would embarrass a potential client at first pitch like this? How many would actually succeed in such a way by highlighting said client’s board-level dissonance?

I’m sure it works for Alistair Campbell but, by dint of his reputation, I think AC has most other PRs at a disadvantage here.  

Chewing the cud with journalists

When I was a journalist and short of a story I would spend hours on the phone talking to contacts for ‘golden quotes’. It’s a basic news trawling exercise that relies upon the art of making conversation, rocket science it aint.

I would just talk, have a chat, chew the cud, engage about anything and everything and wait for the contact to say something interesting and… newsworthy, why else would I have been calling?

The approach could be refined in proportion to the expertise of said contact. For example, if I was working on a provincial daily newspaper and wanted to know what’s going on in town, I'd speak to the pub landlord, the post office master, or newsagent. Just a bit of idle chit-chat for a few minutes, and I'd turn up a story.

A refined version of the ‘golden quotes’ tactic served equally well with contacts who had more specialist expertise than the bloke down the pub. The only difference was that the chit-chat took place at a more rarefied level of discourse. The outcome, however, would usually be the same. After a few minutes on the blower, I’d have a lead for a story.

Any decent reporter worth their salt continues to employ this tactic, they pick up the phone, they chat, they listen (they take notes).

Now sometimes it’s obvious why a journalist is calling, you know their angle and this can limit the chit chat a little. Other times a journalist calls up and they genuinely have no angle, they’re just after a story, anything really. 

I make this point to clients all the time nothing else matters to journalists, apart from stories. It's their medium of exchange, lifeblood.

It’s great when you can give them something, it doesn’t have be about your organization or client (journalists don’t particularly care about your client, they care about stories). Perhaps they’d be interested in a story you’ve read somewhere else (though usually not from a rival publication).

At other times you don’t have have a story at all. It’s at times like this that I like to turn the ‘golden quotes’ tactic into reverse, especially if the journalist is not near a deadline. I like to engage them in a conversation, find out what’s going on in their world, what’s happening in the newsroom? What’s today’s splash? How many staff photographers are on the books these days? Are they doing any freelance work? How many leads have they had this week? Best ever scoop? How did they stack it up? Talk news with journalists, talk their language. 

I think it helps.