Irv Hamilton, our crisis management expert at Placemaking Group, sent this note to me. After I read it I thought, I want everyone to read it! So…
A vacuum is a curious thing. It is consciously seeking to fill the void that makes a vacuum a vacuum.
In news, vacuums are largely made up of missing information. It used to be that reporters would seek to satisfy the vacuum’s desire for more information by asking questions and reporting. Then the reporter would fill the vacuum’s void by sharing what he or she had learned, in the form of news. Under the best of circumstances, the news vacuum would be filled, and audiences’ curiosity would be directed to the next news vacuum.
And there are very few reporters today to produce the information that fills the news vacuum.
But the vacuum is there, prepared to be filled with information, whether true or false.
Tiger Woods has played to that vacuum by saying almost nothing about the episode with his car. To fill the void, there has been a steady stream of speculation, assumptions and other critical observations about what may or may not have happened. The vacuum created by the absence of information continues to be filled with editorial debris, making the story bigger than it is, or than it deserves to be.
The moral for Tiger Woods is simply: understand that the news void exists; and it will be filled with your story, correctly or incorrectly. Move quickly to get the basic facts on the table. Don’t let the tabloids tell your story. Tell it yourself, in your words.
I agree that by staying quiet Tiger Woods attracted more attention to himself than he imagined but at the same time it’s not his responsibility to fill the media in about his personal life, it’s his job to entertain spectators by playing golf. Yet it is unfortunate that media feels entitled to pry into the lives of celebrities when their job isn’t to entertain us with their personal lives but with their talent (or now a days, lack of). With that notion in mind, I think that if Tiger Woods had addressed this issue early on, it would’ve delayed if not slowed the eventual exposure of his many affairs, giving him time to prepare for this ultimate PR nightmare.