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Sorry but I've worked in crisis PR, and this article doesn't jibe at all with my experience. This statement in particular rings false: "If for one second you t

Sorry but I've worked in crisis PR, and this article doesn't jibe at all with my experience. This statement in particular rings false: "If for one second you think that Phil Robertson of ‘Duck Dynasty’ isn’t coached by a public relations team prior, you’re an idiot." I'm sure that Phil Robertson has gotten a lot of PR support over the years. I've seen it happen over and over again though: someone gets used to receiving only positive coverage and gets overly confident about press interviews, and then refuses formal media training. Amazingly, things can go great for years... until that one disastrous interview where everything changes. Then every interview after that focuses on that issue for the next few years. Then a PR team gets called into manage the newly formed crisis situation. That's probably what happened here: he had gotten used to getting tons of positive coverage, and he started to think that he had a handle on the press. So he (and his team) start to do less and less preparation and due diligence for each interview, until this disaster occurred.

GigabyteCoin 13y ago
Just look at Michael Richards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Richards#Laugh_Factory_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Richards#Laugh_Factory_... That Laugh Factory incident is one of the 4 main things he is known for on his Wikipedia page. I'm sure he was told many times throughout his life just how wrong what he said actually was. And he proceeded to talk that way not just to a single interviewer but a large audience.
smacktoward 13y ago
Yeah, that was my thought too. Two thoughts actually: 1) I don't doubt that he got extensive coaching from a PR team. I do doubt that he followed their advice. History is littered with the bleached bones of the reputations of people who walked into an interview thinking they knew how to deal with the media better than their PR person did. There's no shortage of cases of people with great PR support going "off-book," either impulsively or on purpose, and getting a very different reaction than they expected. 2) The fact that A&E fired the guy argues very strongly that this was not a pre-planned stunt. That's the sort of thing companies do when they are getting unexpected heat from the public and the execs are panicking. If they'd planned this they wouldn't have fired him right away -- they'd have wrung it for even more attention by sending him out on an "apology tour" or the like, so he could get an hour on Oprah's couch and then remind all her viewers when to tune in to Duck Dynasty.

GigabyteCoin 13y ago

Just look at Michael Richards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Richards#Laugh_Factory_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Richards#Laugh_Factory_... That Laugh Factory incident is one of the 4 main things he is known for on his Wikipedia page. I'm sure he was told many times throughout his life just how wrong what he said actually was. And he proceeded to talk that way not just to a single interviewer but a large audience.

smacktoward 13y ago

Yeah, that was my thought too. Two thoughts actually: 1) I don't doubt that he got extensive coaching from a PR team. I do doubt that he followed their advice. History is littered with the bleached bones of the reputations of people who walked into an interview thinking they knew how to deal with the media better than their PR person did. There's no shortage of cases of people with great PR support going "off-book," either impulsively or on purpose, and getting a very different reaction than they expected. 2) The fact that A&E fired the guy argues very strongly that this was not a pre-planned stunt. That's the sort of thing companies do when they are getting unexpected heat from the public and the execs are panicking. If they'd planned this they wouldn't have fired him right away -- they'd have wrung it for even more attention by sending him out on an "apology tour" or the like, so he could get an hour on Oprah's couch and then remind all her viewers when to tune in to Duck Dynasty.