Murdoch family's heritage hinders understanding of role of communications in time of crisis

The inability of the Murdoch family and senior management of News Corporation and News International to engage publicly with the forces at play which are tapping at the very foundations of the organisation betrays all too clearly the way they have traditionally done business in the past.   They have prospered in a world of meetings behind closed doors; of private meetings to brief key stakeholders on the agendas which were important to the family and the organisation; of sympathetic treatment by their own media to communicate key agendas.  All could be termed the traditional approach to public relations based on controlling communications and agendas and in their case, actually controlling media.   There is no sense of them understanding the role of public relations in a modern democracy, building a constituency of support through dialogue with wider stakeholders which most organisations have started to learn and adopt.  

Why is nobody speaking for the Murdochs; or why are the the family not themselves speaking out?  They have some of the best PR advice through their son-in-law, Matthew Freud but their continued silence speaks of their uncertainty and lack of understanding of these difficult times.   The only forms of communication - and unintended - currently from the  Murdoch family are hurried snaps taken by the paparazzi of the family and senior executives behind tinted car windows as they rush from one "fortress" or underground carpark to another.  Images of the bunker provide a powerful narrative for other media and for the general public.

(Daily Telegraph.)

The family need to communicate in these difficult times as their continued silence must be starting to having significant damage on the morale of people working for the company; only heightened by Gordon Brown's extraordinary outburst in Parliament yesterday where he called News International a "criminal media nexus".  Here is a former Prime Minister calling a major global corporation a criminal enterprise - has this ever happened before in Parliament?  I doubt it.  Comments like this will be noted in the USA and in global capital markets and will be a question mark against the organisation and its reputation.

Crisis PR models suggest that the Murdochs probably thought that phone hacking was an issue not a developing crisis and so did not respond adequately when they had the time.  Their initial response would also appear to have involved a cover-up.   Timothy Coombs a leading academic in the field of crisis communications also highlights that crises which are due to organisational "misdeeds" such as cover-ups have the most severe consequences.  

Equally crisis communications models would also indicate that today's crisis can become a different crisis tomorrow.   I think it is increasingly likely that the Murdoch family will be required to step back from day to day management in their media operations under a "fit and proper" ruling and become passive investors with much smaller stakes than they have at present both in the UK and USA.  That is the much larger crisis which they may face and how they respond now will determine that very potential outcome in two or three years time.