Waiting Until You're Sure

Is there anything that hasn't been said about Vice President Dick Cheney's inadvisable decision to avoid informing the media about his mishap on a Texas ranch? Without belaboring the issue, suffice it to say that Cheney continues to defend his waiting nearly 24 hours to inform the media that he had accidentally shot his friend while hunting, the fact that the media was informed through a small Corpus Christi newspaper rather than notifying the White House Press Corps, and that it was days later before Cheney himself had any comment on the matter.

This will go down as a perfect example of how, when dealing with the media, how an action appears can be more important than whether it is defensible. Was the Vice President correct in saying that it was prudent to have someone who understands weaponry write the original story and transmit it through the wire services? Well, maybe, although who determined that only the Corpus Christi paper was capable of getting it right? And besides, was the real issue understanding the dynamics of shotguns...or of what happened and why?

The price of waiting to release information was to create the impression that it was more important to manage the news than to be upfront about it. We would all like to write our own stories when a crisis occurs, but that's not going to happen. What we can do is to build relationships based on honesty and trust with the media when times are good, and then to let that built-up trust navigate the public through the inevitable holes that open up in any crisis.

All crises create a void of information...a void that will be filled one way or the other. To let it be filled by others is to guarantee we have no say in the outcome. Then, we have no one to blame but ourselves.