Friday afternoons or in midst of major events are known in the PR business as time to “take out the trash.”
If you have to ’fess up about something or release a damning report, it’s best to do it when you’ve got the best chance of keeping it out of the news cycle.
That’s precisely what happened when the premier’s office intervened to make sure the provincial government’s response to a troubling report on a teen who was failed by the social safety net was released at 3 p.m. on the day of the federal election.
We know this only thanks to emails obtained through freedom of information requests filed by local freelance journalist Bob Mackin.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s children’s advocate, called it a case of “cynical calculation,” and we must agree.
This wasn’t a report about a small government faux pas or item of negligible interest. It was about a young aboriginal teen known as Paige who spent most of her life getting shuffled around various types of government care before she aged out of the system and died of an overdose.
The way the province handled the issue highlights the deeply self-interested way our politicians and their staff go about our official business. While strategizing how to spin news is as old as politics itself, the practice has been elevated to a dark art form in the last decade.
We live in a perpetual election campaign.
Public institutions send out oodles of “good news” press releases but try to slip the unflattering ones through on busy days – or, alternatively, post them on their websites, hoping journalists won’t bother to check them out.
This is particularly troubling with organizations such as the RCMP. When they’re looking for the public’s help, we are, like most members of the media, keen to help keep the public safe. But when the RCMP has some less than stellar news about one of their own members, that news is not exactly flagged. The latest case in point is the story on page 3 of today’s paper, where a local officer has been charged with impaired driving. Needless to say, there was no press release sent our way on that one.
Transparency equals credibility. And transparency, when you are responsible for lives and liberty, is essential in earning and keeping the public’s trust.
The provincial government has seriously eroded that trust – let’s hope other institutions don’t follow that example and consider it a good practice.
