Why dodge the question? The maps were 50 years old, they got lost. So here is how we’re handling it…why avoid the question?

This is the closest I could come up with – I took a media pr class which culminated in a practice scenario where the mock situation presented was one where a sewer pipeline sprang a leak right underneath the stage on high school graduation night. The graduation ceremony had to be rescheduled, the public was upset, and the aggressive reporter wanted to know why the wastewater management company didn’t know exactly where the sewer pipeline was.

In the mock scenario, the pipeline was very old and the original system maps were long lost. The spokesperson’s job was to redirect the focus away from the fact that the wastewater company didn’t know exactly where the pipe was to the fact that their primary focus was public health and safety and that they were doing everything possible to ensure it – by cordoning off the field and stage, sending construction and cleanup workers to the area immediately to clean up the sewage and fix the pipe, coordinating with city police and public health agencies, etc.

The pr person artfully dodged the questions about why the 50 year old maps were lost and successfully redirected the focus to the outstanding response the wastewater company was making to the unanticipated sewage leak, how it was aggressively moving to clean up the mess and protect public health, and how it successfully coordinated efforts between relevant public agencies.

It’s important to keep track of the objective, and successfully implementing an environmental protection project trumps personal ego boosts. Would you really sleep better at night if your “intellectual slap-down” was at the cost of environmental protections?

In PR, you never want to make someone else look bad, even if they do not show the same restraint. Look at the current election campaigns and you see the reaction – Obama has stuck to discussion of the issues and is enjoying a healthy lead, whereas McCain’s negative campaigning is turning people off in droves, even costing him endorsements from his own party.

It is not necessary to slap someone down to accomplish your objective – in fact the opposite is true – if you can build consensus among all stakeholders, inclusing those who you wouldn’t normally consider as allies, you have a much better chance at successfully bringing your environmental protection project to fruition.