McClatchy has a fascinating and comprehensive description of the White House’s messaging efforts around the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
Within hours, it was cranking out a sustained barrage across the broad spectrum of modern media — statements, reports, e-mails, tweets, photos and videos — all punctuated by a high-profile presidential visit to the Gulf followed by an incendiary speech at the White House and a video recap with exclusive behind-the-scenes views of Obama in “West Wing Week,” the White House’s new online program at www.whitehouse.gov.
I’d noticed the White House’s long timeline blog post earlier, “The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP Oil Spill”. It starts with Search and Rescue, goes on to The President is Alerted, and lists Assets Deployed To Date starting the night of April 20th and continuing every day since. They’re continuing to update the timeline with every day’s five to ten actions, and its length at this point is awe-inspiring.
Most importantly, their publication schedule is reaching the media: the day after the timeline was first published, Politico had an item headlined Disaster in the print edition that started with Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the House Republican Conference Chairman, saying the government didn’t react quickly enough to the oil leak. But at the bottom, it mentioned the “6,300-word opus” posted by the White House.
McClatchy’s article ends with Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director, saying “”We were successful at getting a pretty high percentage of the coverage accurately depicting the steps the administration had taken . . . . It was not clear that was going to happen (several) days ago.”
Impressive results for a crisis communication plan, in the wake of an environmental disaster that will continue to affect us for years. Hopefully the management of the leak will have positive results soon as well….
