This paper is an examination of the ways in which companies deal with the effects of negative publicity. Negative publicity can be such a devastating situation for a business to face that an entire branch of public relations has arisen in the effort to anticipate potential problems and provide a plan of action to deal with them. "Crisis management" has become as vital to a corporate business plan as a long-term financial program. However, no matter how exhaustive the plan or how imaginative the possible scenarios, most companies are simply unable to anticipate every possible crisis they might face. Johnson & Johnson, for instance, could not have guessed that someone might decide to put poison in a few random capsules of Tylenol, while Procter and Gamble never considered the fact that their original, turn-of-the century moon-and-stars logo might someday be interpreted to be a Satanic symbol. The companies that have handled unexpected crises best have not been those able to predict the exact nature of those crises, but instead have been those whose fundamental public relations policies and corporate strategies have made them able and willing to respond openly, rapidly, and completely when disaster strikes.
Crisis management, the technique of "helping clients put the best possible 'spin' on a bad situation" (Stauber 19) was invented in the early 1900s by a public relations consultant named Ivy Lee. Lee worked with a number of major American corporations, and one of his most famous cases was in consultation with the Pennsylvania Railroad. When a devastating train wreck occurred, the railroad's first impulse was to hush up the incident and try to act as though nothing had happened.
However, Lee insisted on instituting what he termed an "open policy," providing special trains to take reporters directly to the site of the accident and providing them with immediate information and access to survivors and railroad officials. Th...