James Lee, senior VP and chief public affairs officer at ChoicePoint, spoke at the PRSA International Conference today about ChoicePoint’s experience with the theft of 145,000 customer records in 2005.
It was an interesting study in crisis management, but what stuck me the most was comments by him and the audience about their lousy experiences with reporters. Examples:
- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story four days after news of the theft broke that claimed that ChoicePoint’s CEO was hiding from the media. In fact, Lee said, the CEO had been unusually open to the media, compared to executives at other companies in that situation. He had given several media interviews, but was unavailable when the Journal-Constitution reporter called. The paper’s story was the only one to accuse the CEO of evasiveness.
- ChoicePoint wanted to make a careful distinction between theft of data and a hack, because the latter term implies a computer security vulnerability. This is an important distinction to investors and regulators. However, one west coast newspaper had a policy of referring to all information thefts as “hacks,” regardless of the nature of the breach. This made ChoicePoint’s problem look worse than it really was.
- Pressure to file on deadline forces reporters to seek opinion instead of facts because opinion is easier to get. “In the real world, it takes time to find facts,” Lee said. “If you don’t have facts immediately, they’ll find some [pundit] with an opinion.” Early impressions tend to stick, which means that subsequent facts are buried or ignored.
- Media outlets throw business stories to inexperience reporters, who don’t understand the fine points of an often complex story and need to be educated under deadline, leading to errors and misunderstanding.
- News outlets nearly always stick by their story, even when the evidence is overwhelming that they’re wrong.
- These problems are only getting worse as newsrooms cut staff and competition compresses deadlines.
PR people have to deal with the media constantly and so are more likely to have gripes with the media, but the level of frustration surprised me, nevertheless. This is one reason mainstream media gets so little sympathy for its current woes. Years of arrogance have left it with very few friends at a time when it could use a few.
Come on Paul. Tying these incidents to the death of newspapers is preposterous. Its also poor judgement on your part. Don’t you remember working in the trenches? I enjoy reading your site, but all I ask is that you be fair. How about calling a respected journalist to comment on these incidents? When reporters from any publication start playing by some PR person’s rules, it’s a sad day for all of us. They’ve got to ask hard questions, interpret the facts and yes, it might not end up on the same page of some PR playbook. Yep there will always be inexperienced reporters too. Remeber being one Paul? Give me a break.
My point isn’t that newspapers should dance to the tune of PR people, but rather that these are examples of arrogant and unresponsive behavior that make newspapers look aloof. Public trust in the media is at an all-time low right now, in part because of ths kind of thing. I know the mindset from having worked in print for many years. You take care of your own, sometimes to the extent of failing to acknowledge mistakes that you know you made.
Thanks for responding Paul. I understand your point. I just find it appalling that anyone would place so much emphasis on the PR maven of a company that paid millions in penalties to settle charges that its security and record-handling procedures violated consumer privacy rights and federal laws. This company’s breach was the impetus for California’s data breach laws. And what does this guy do? He points out some apparent newspaper blunders. And you use his comments to illustrate apparent arrogance in the news media. How about taking a look at how the company could have done a better job with crisis communications and disseminating information?
Dear Anonymous – Thanks for your comments. I actually did do exactly what you suggested in your post during my presentation, only one small piece of which focused on issues created by the media’s challenges in reporting complex stories.
Your post illustrates one of my points perfectly. In the new world of user generated media, facts become fixed in time and are extraordinarily difficult to update or correct. For example ChoicePoint was not the impetus for the California breach law. In fact were were not even the first company to comply with the 2003 law, but we were the first to apply it (and build on) the principles nationwide despite no legal requirement to do so.
Criticism of our past practices was clearly justified, but ignoring the improvements made in the past three years is not.
Therein lies some of the biggest challenges that traditional and “new media” journalists face along with the business community: How to ensure facts remain current and fairly, accurately presented to allow readers to devine what is history and what is current event? What is fact and what is opinion repeated as fact?
If you want to discuss further, my email is james.lee@choicepoint.com