229: When a Disliked Staff Member Causes PR Chaos: Don Lemon and CNN

Over the President's Day weekend, Don Lemon, the co anchor of CNN this morning, was fortunate enough to schedule a little getaway. However, it was reported that this getaway was more like his boss is saying get away from CNN for a few days because of these remarks.

I think it's the wrong road to go down, she says. People, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn't in her prime. So.

Welcome to the Indestructible PR podcast where we use current events and tested media and PR strategies to help prevent or manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. In this episode dealing with a PR nightmare when a dislike staff member causes chaos. The on air exchange that put the squeeze on CNN management. It's a situation that every company dreads. That PR nightmare caused by staff member who they already know is disliked by their colleagues. This staff member may have a history of being difficult to work with. They're causing problems, might have a little bit of an attitude. But when their mistakes or when that problem causes a PR crisis, the company must act quickly to mitigate the damage. In some industries these problems are more prevalent because they are in the spotlight. There may be greater interest to the general public to television news is one example. Lately morning television news has been of particular interest. Good Morning America three for one with T.J. holmes and Amy Robach. Before that there was Matt Lauer and the Today show. I mean those were problems of the sexual nature. But certainly people in the industry, when there's a little diva complex, the public tends to hear about it. And it doesn't matter if it's television news or if it's social media, whatever it is. If there is an area that people are focus particularly on the leadership and the staff, people are going to pay attention when something goes a little sideways. Now Don Lemon made these denigrating remarks during a February 16 episode of CNN this morning. It was a discussion about politicians ages. No surprise it stemmed from a conversation about President Biden's age or mental competence to be a president in the White House. What Don Lemon was Trump trying to do was to counter a talking point by GOP candidate Nikki Haley. The GOP talking point questioning President Biden's competency, his mental competency based on his advanced age, if you will. But then the conversation progressed from there and you could see in the clip. I'll let you hear it in a moment. Don Lemon was going a little off the cuff. And when you go off the cuff on live video or live audio, it can get dangerous. So as he started to speak, his co host hosts Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins, looked through him, almost at him in a way that said, what are you saying? What can I say? What should I say now? They should have spoken up, but I get it. When you watch it, it's one of those car crashes happening in slow motion, and you don't really know what to say. And perhaps they didn't say much because Don Lemon was already known to be a little snippy with Caitlin Collins. She's 30 years old. That's pretty young to be on the air, to be a co anchor, so we already get a sense of how he may feel about her. Poppy Harlow at 40, also younger than Don Lemon. Now, the age of Don Lemon wasn't really something I ever thought about before. I mean, my goodness, he looks good. But when this whole PR crisis happened, I made a post on TikTok about it. Someone had alerted me to it. From a TikTok live or. No, actually, I had known about it, but someone was talking about it on TikTok Live. We were, you know, discussing. Which, by the way, if you're not on TikTok, join it. But I have these somewhat frequent TikTok lives. It's like when I want to, like, turn off my brain. I'll just go on to TikTok Live, which, again, kind of dangerous to go live when you're not scripted, prepared. But I'm just riffing, talking to people. If you can't tell, I absolutely love it. But someone in that live brought up an amazing point that I never thought of. How old is Don Lemon? And don Lemon is 56 years old. So he's calling out Nikki Haley, who's 52, and saying that she is past her prime. Oh, wait a minute. You didn't hear? Well, why don't you just take a listen to the entire exchange, then cringe and then come back? Take a listen.

This whole talk about age makes me uncomfortable. I think that. I think it's the wrong road to go down. She says people, you know, politicians or something, and not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn't in her prime. Sorry. When a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s, that's not, according to me, prime for what? It's just like, prime. If you look it up, it'll. If you look. If you Google, when is a woman in her prime? It'll say twenties, thirties, and forties. I don't necessarily.

So I got it in that.

I'm not saying I Agree with that. So I think she has to be careful about saying that, you know, politicians aren't in their prime.

You need to qualify. Are you talking about prime for, like, childbearing, or are you talking about.

The facts or. Google it. Everybody at home, when is a woman in her prime? It says 20s, 30s, and 40s, and I'm just saying Nikki Haley should be careful about saying that politicians are not in their prime, and they need to be in their prime when they serve, because she wouldn't be in her prime according to Google. Google or whatever it is.

You're still cringing, right? That clip is just awful. Now for Don Lemon. One part of that clip that I'll give him is he was clearly going off script. He was starting in a place that made sense in context. It made sense. He wanted to push back against the GOP talking point about who are they to talk about mental competency? It's not like their candidate is some spring chicken. Okay, so the argument in and of itself, okay, but the problem is when you're countering that unless that person is 18 years old, you really can't counter age with age. To make it worse, he countered a female's age with the age of President Biden. And then to make it worse is he did. One of the worst and most dangerous things that you can do in a PR crisis is that he doubled down. As soon as he said that Nikki Haley was past her prime at 52, he had to double down and say, google it. Google it. What does it say? A woman's past your prime, in her 30s, even 40s. He didn't know what he was talking about. Now let's look at the things that you need to do immediately when an employee causes problems for you. Here are three tips for how to react when something goes sideways. The first step is what CNN did very, very well, and that's act quickly. The first step when dealing with a PR nightmare caused by a disliked staff member is to act quickly. The company should assess the situation and determine the extent of the damage caused by by that staff member's mistake. They need to gather all the facts and develop a plan of action to deal with the situation. In the case of cnn, it was on the air live for everyone to see. It was recorded, it was shared, it was tweeted, it was posted, it was on TikTok. It was absolutely everywhere. Lots of people chimed in. Chris Licht was the head of cnn. He was in a position where he needed to react immediately, and he did. So. The first step that they took is that Don Lemon came off the air and he called in to a meeting. And in that meeting, he said that Don Lemon called, apologized to the staff. Then in newspaper articles, there was a little bit of backtracking. You see, you know, a lot of, you know, sources said. Sources said here, but they immediately put him into training. So Chris Lick knew, I think right away, like, he can't get fired for this, and I don't think he should have gotten fired. Like you set a standard. If the benchmark at CNN is if you say something stupid like that you're going to be fired, then wouldn't be fair to say that everyone at CNN is going to be fired at Fox News, msnbc. I'm saying this as someone who goes live on video, who does tiktoks. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to put your foot in your mouth at times. You shouldn't be called on that. But it needs to be a learning moment. There needs to be change. There needs to be some type of repentance in there to recognize what he did. So the first thing he did is he had to call into the meeting and he needed to apologize. Chris Lick needed to address the fact that people do not like this guy and if he doesn't do something, there's going to be some public pushback. Then on Monday evening, the CNN staffers were notified by Lick, so again, he's a network chairman, that Lemon did agree to go to training after they had a, quote, frank and meaningful conversation. And this also meant that he was going to be returning as a co host. Now, having them go to training. Now, this is something I happen to be dealing with this with like a client myself, having to go through this process of the training that is a go to. I mean, if you don't want to put someone out of a job for what they did. Now, if they didn't break a rule or go against policy or do something, why are we firing them? You have to make sure that there's a reason why they're being fired. If they're not, there needs to be some act of contrition that people are going to see on your staff. It's a way to build up that respect. I just happened to tell someone just today on the phone about a decision that they had to make, and they were very stressed about it and they were waiting for this blowback. And I put that little nugget of a reminder in there to say, remember, you acted like a leader. You may just be seeing the negative of it, but Think about the people in that building who now admire you for acting like a leader, for doing the right thing. Now, the next thing that you need to do is to issue a statement. It could be. If it's a big company, it needs to be a public statement. After you've assessed the situation, exactly what happened, you've lift every rock, you, you've gone into every nook and cranny, there should be some type of public statement that acknowledges a mistake and apologizes for any harm caused. If you're public facing like the case of Don Lemon, he needed to come out and say something, which he did. The statement should be sincere, transparent, and should make it clear that the company is taking steps to assess the situation. Now, CNN did that, and they did a very good job on that. But Don Lemon's apology was awful. The first one that came out on February 16, he tweeted at 1:32pm stating, the reference I made to a woman's prime this morning was in artful and irrelevant. As colleagues and loved ones have pointed out, and I regret it, a woman's age doesn't define her either personally or professionally. I have countless women in my life who prove that every day. What made the PR crisis even more chaotic was that response. Because if you listened, it wasn't an apology. All he said was that the statement he made was inartful and irrelevant. Think of those two words first, they're thesaurus words. He had to Google those words to figure out what he was going to say. Because in Artful, you have to go pretty deep into thesaurus to come up with that word. And in artful does not mean an apology. It just means something awkward. It wasn't awkward what he said. It was insulting what he said. The other word he used, irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant at all. If anything, he gave people talking point for calling him irrelevant and telling us that a woman's age doesn't define her either personally or professionally. Says who? You. That morning you didn't feel that way. This is an empty apology. It's a qualified apology. Both definitions of those apologies make it a non apology. So Don Lemon released a sour. A sour response. But Chris Lick, cnn. They did the right thing and they posted it to their own site. All right. The next step is considering terminating that staff member. If the mistake was severe, the company may need to consider terminating the staff member responsible for that nightmare. And it is a difficult decision to make. But if it's in the best interest of the company to let that staff member go. Especially if that mistake was a result of a pattern of problematic behavior, then they need to go. But you need to fall back on a policy because you can't just fire at will. Unless you can, of course, but people need to know why, because they need to be held to some form of a standard that they fell short of. Next, it's important to handle the situation with as much transparency as possible. So if the company decides to terminate that staff member, they should handle the situation with transparency. Make it clear that the staff member was let go as a result of their mistake, and they should avoid speaking negatively about that staff member or sharing any personal information that could be seen as gossip. The focus should be on the company's commitment to doing the right thing and taking responsibility for for the situation. But again, only if that information is allowed to be public. There is private information. There's going to be a confidentiality clause in some terminations, but if it can be made public, should make it public. People need to know how you are thinking. And lastly, we want to mitigate the damage to your company's reputation. If the staff member is a high profile employee or an executive or someone on camera, like in the case of Don Lemon, the company may need to take extra steps to mitigate the damage to their reputation. So this could include enlisting the help of a crisis management consultant. Yes. Being proactive in your communications with the public and taking all the necessary steps to rebuild trust with stakeholders. In this case, again with cnn, Don Lemon was going to receive outside training. So in every episode I'd leave you with one easy to remember takeaway to help you build your indestructible reputation. When an employee goes rogue, confidentiality creeps out the door. Leaks can happen as the incident is happening in real time. So it's incredibly important that you are prepared for any type of PR crisis that can result from an employee. Because remember, any type of employee problem is the definition of a PR crisis. It's an operational crisis and when it is public facing, when your stakeholders are involved or they're aware of the incident, you need to respond. And one of those tips for how to respond, head on over to my website, mollymcpherson.com crisistemplate and you can purchase purchase your own boilerplate to be able to write your own crisis communication plan for any incident. Again, that's@mollymcpherson.com crisistemplate that's all for this week. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.