Do you think the editor kept his job?

Blame game

The sinking of the Costa Concordia in Tuscan waters remains an international news story and has seen the humiliation of the ship’s captain. Jim Preen comments on the crisis communications strategy of the ship’s owners.

Captain Schettino, Master of the Costa Concordia, has been denounced as the most hated man in Italy, dubbed Captain Coward and is said to have ‘cried like a baby for 15 minutes’ after abandoning his ship. The world’s media has unleashed its size 10 Doc Martin boots and given him an almighty kicking from which he is unlikely to recover, at least in career terms.

If Schettino is the villain of the piece then the hero is the coastguard, Captain Gregorio De Falco who ordered Schettino back on to his vessel, an order that was never obeyed.

In the aftermath of such a tragedy the media are always on the lookout for heroes and villains and Schettino became the perfect scapegoat.

So what’s been the response of the vessel’s operators (Costa Crociere) and owners (Carnival Corporation) to the sinking of their ship and the vilification of their captain?

Initially they did what any crisis communications professional would tell them: they expressed sympathy for the victims and stressed the need to preserve the environment.

Thereafter their sole crisis communications strategy seems to have been distancing themselves from their beleaguered captain and effectively fuelling the media feeding frenzy.

Here’s a short extract from an initial press release: “preliminary indications are that there may have been significant human error on the part of the ship’s Master, Captain Francesco Schettino, which resulted in these grave consequences.”

In the informal court of international public opinion the evidence is stacked against Schettino, but from a crisis management point of view should his employers have placed the blame so firmly on his shoulders?

Schettino is nothing if not one of their senior employees, but by publicly agreeing that he is almost solely responsible for the disaster isn’t at least part of that blame reflected back on the company? They employed him; so Costa must have thought he was up to the job. To put it another way, if Schettino was so incompetent what does that say about Costa’s employment procedures? Presumably you are not made ship’s captain of such a massive vessel on a whim.

It has also emerged that various vessels, including the Costa Concordia, had previously sailed close to the Island of Giglio. If this was an absurdly dangerous manoeuvre, as now seems to be the received wisdom, why had the owners not issued orders preventing it? And if Costa didn’t know this had happened before, why didn’t they know?

In immediately pillorying their captain, Costa also cast themselves in an unflattering light. They sent a clear message that when the going gets tough the company is quite prepared to toss any unfortunate employee to the wolves, or in this case, the international media.

Presumably their thinking was that the captain’s actions were so indefensible that an early, quick, dissociation from him was their best option. But, laying the blame in such a startlingly early manner can come back to bite you when the full story emerges.

History is littered with examples. For example, initially, News International claimed that phone hacking at The News of The World was the responsibility of one ‘rogue reporter’, we now know that was very far from the case.

The Costa strategy may well be proved right, but playing the blame game early on can give the impression of a company jumping to conclusions rather than appearing calm, collected and in control of a crisis even if, like a swan, their feet are paddling frantically just below the surface.