230: Dilbert Done: Creator Scott Adams Dropped After Racist Rant

How to ruin your reputation in one video by Dilbert creator Scott Adams, I.

Discovered that the price of free speech is really high and there are only a few people willing to pay it. So I decided to pay it.

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 reput reputation. As you may have heard, the cartoonist took to his YouTube channel recently and said based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. And you know the rest of the story. On the February 22nd episode of Dilbert creator Scott Adams podcast and nightly YouTube live stream called Real Coffee with Scott Adams, did we know that he had all of these other outlets? He began his hour long broadcast like he always does, chats with the audience and then they do a simultaneous sip. I only know this because I was doing a deep dive on Scott Adams and all the media he had and watching and listening to how this man thinks. I had to get to the bottom of how the creator of Dilbert got into such a Dilbert over these remarks like how could he actually think that way? So this week on the podcast, let's talk about one of the reasons he got into trouble and why he got quote unquote canceled. This is actually a real definition of cancel. Not only is it still cancel culture, but it is a guy who got canceled from newspapers all across the country in a syndication. I want to look at the communication piece of it. Like what can we all learn from it? Highly doubtful. Anyone listening to this podcast right now has a national and international reach with a cartoon. But we are all at risk of losing everything based on something that we say or do that goes online and goes viral and turns into a huge blowback where it affects our reputation and our livelihood. So I just want to pull away some thoughts on why Scott Adams got into this mess other than the obvious and a lesson, an indestructible PR tip for how you can protect yourself to ensure that some something like this doesn't happen to you. Having said this, let's start with this caveat here that the reason why he was canceled, and I mean this literally, not in the cliche sense of the cancel culture, he was literally canceled from a syndicator and all the newspapers that carried the Dilbert cartoon because of racial remarks. It's as simple as that. What he said was wrong. But let's talk about how he did it that really, really got him into trouble and made him go. So Vi. Now what he was doing is he was talking about erasmusen poll, which may sound like any other poll. Like it might sound like, oh, a Gallup poll or the Pew Research Center. Not necessarily. Because this Rasmussen poll that he was Reading said 47% of black respondents are not willing to say it's okay to be white. And he was quoted as saying that's like a real poll. Now, where this went viral is because the press, media, social media, people like myself commenting on it, it's so easy to clip it. Like, this is a story about a beloved character and its creator who surprised us all by being a racist. Now, many people who have followed him, now that we've researched him, Scott Adams has said other problematic in the past. So anyone who's really been a longtime follower of him knows that this isn't his first rodeo. He's made sexist comments for years. He claimed that the television network UPM fired him for being white. He's had problematic issues before, but this is the first time that Dilbert's been done away with based on something that Adams had said. Now here are the couple of the issues that we have here. So he's citing a poll and giving the impression that it is a unbiased poll and it's not. People know now that the Rasmussen poll is a right leaning pollster. So it produces these mainstream polls. Their methods are questionable and according to the New York Times, it's called dubious sampling and weighting technique. So the Rasmussen results tend to skew towards conservative. They were known. I pulled this from the New York Times article that they had a poll claiming that Donald Trump cited that showed a 50% job approval rating more than 10% higher than Gallup's poll at the time. So that's how this poll can be used, you know, politically. That was a poll that Adams was using. Now, when he made comments like this, they were quickly picked up by the media, spread all across social media platforms. And then everyone saw Adams in a negative. And we know in this environment that we're in, that means an immediate boycott. Like, we must cancel them. Like, this is the cancel culture machine at work. It's when outrage mixes with disappointment and people want justice. We cannot have a creator of a beloved character say such racial hateful remarks. Now what also added to it in this social viral culture is Twitter owner Elon Musk had to chime in and he had tweeted and I saw this happening in real time. The Media is racist. And then in a follow up, he said, for a very long time, US Media was racist against non white people. Now they're racist against whites and Asians. Okay, so, you know, when you have Elon Musk chiming in on your side, you know things are not going well for you. Now, I was following this as it happened in real time. And because when someone is in a viral hot seat and their viral moment, I'm always curious in the response. Like, I come at it like, what are they doing? What are they thinking? And what I'm really looking for is human behavior. Because human behavior and ego so often dictate a response that we see publicly. Now, once these remarks a few days later came out and people were aware of it then, hundreds of newspapers across the country, the Star Tribune in my hometown, Minneapolis, Washington Post, LA Times, it's everywhere. They're no longer carrying the Dilbert work. And the distributor, it's Andrew McNeil Universal, said that they were severing ties with him as well. He also had a book coming up. The title of the book was Reframe youe Brain. And it was set to be released this September from Penguin Random House. It was canceled. So certainly he reframed. All right. He framed himself as a racist and someone who was canceled, like, wiped out, like, his reputation, all of it is ruined because of this event. What also happens in these types of situations, why it's so damaging? It's not only the act itself, which, again, we know saying this right now is repulsive, I'm building off of that. But when you bring in the public relations reaction to it, what they do in the response, that makes it even more offensive, more discriminatory. Anything that is related to race, ethnicity, religion, diversity. If you're trying to use a precision like mentality to get around it. When you speak and you show people that, and you show that, you're being thoughtful and critical and you're creating a discussion. And where you land is a place that is universally neutral. So maybe you're coming at it from an academic point of view or a thinking point of view, or you're trying to solve a problem, you're trying to do something that helps the problem. But whenever you want to be divisive and you want to be extremely opinionated about those issues, it's going to be dicey. It's very, very tricky. I call these third rail issues. No matter when you touch it, you're going to feel a zap somewhere. So when you touch these third rail issues, you have to be Very specific in what your goal is. What are you trying to accomplish with this? If you're trying to create noise and to create buzz, well, then it's pretty easy to do. Just like Scott Adams did. Take a listen to his feelings about bringing up the topic of race.

Scott, what's up, man?

How you feeling?

Doing great. Thanks for having me on.

You're doing great. In the middle of this fire, you're starting doing great.

Oh, I forgot. I'm supposed to be feeling bad about all this. One of the things I realized about myself, I like attention. I just kind of like it.

What you heard? There was a clip from an interview, a follow up interview that he did with Hotep. Jesus. I have a link in the show notes Hotep black man interviewing Scott Adams about what had happened. You know how there was this big flare up. He wanted to get his perspective. That interview, which I watched, I sat, I was actually getting a pedicure when I was watching it. But I was listening and there was something about that interview that caught my eye or caught my ear. It was something that was incredibly unexpected. So take a listen to the moment where I thought, huh, I wasn't expecting that.

A lot of people don't know that I'm left wing. A lot of your audience is going to be confused because the headlines are saying I'm a right wing MAGA guy. I'm actually endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy for president primarily because I'm a single issue voter on fentanyl. He's pretty tough on fentanyl. But what people don't know is I'm super left wing. I volunteered to work for Black Lives Matter, helped Hawk Newsom try to craft some useful policies that the right and the left would agree on.

Now, were you surprised to hear that? I certainly was. And in all the press that's been picked up about Scott Adams, no one is really talking about his liberal viewpoints. And when you listen to that entire interview, if you were to separate it from what he said, what he was giving was context and framing. He is claiming to be a liberal. Now, if he were to discuss this topic from his liberal perspective, someone who's been a supporter, a longtime supporter of the black community, and he didn't use it or buttress it with this Rasmussen pole, Scott Adams likely could have navigated this conversation. It still would have been difficult. But if he would have framed it a little bit differently and people heard him out, he probably would not be in the position that he is in today. And therein lies the Problem. And this is where I tie it into what I see is in my work, what Adams was doing, he wants people to hear him. He doesn't want his privacy. What he wants his people to understand his context. And that's the problem. People don't have time for context. I work with a lot of organizations and one of the reasons they cite for not wanting to be transparent, they don't want to put out information, they don't want to put out tax information, they don't want to put out just anything. They kind of struggle with it. The reason cited is always the risk of context being lost when information is in other people's hands. And I say to that, always, I understand that. I see you, I see it, I understand that. However, it is up to the person to ensure that there is adequate context available so people can consume it in the way it's meant to be consumed. It shouldn't be an excuse for not providing the right information. It should be the excuse for why you need to provide it in a context where people can take it in and people could digest it. And that is the other problem that Adams had. He said this rant in one of his videos, okay, in one of his live streams. Now, me, I'm not a huge Dilbert fan at all. I don't think I've ever spent a penny on Dilbert. I've read it. I've used Dilbert in a presentation here or there. I had a media one like a media relations Dilbert cartoon somewhere that I will never use again. Maybe I should. Now, the timing's perfect to bring out a Dobert comic, but he clearly has his fans and they're all on the live stream commenting. But that is the context. That is the medium he chose to say all these things in a live stream. Now, granted, you got 45 minutes to give your point to put it in context. The problem is people aren't going to sit and watch 45 minutes of what Scott Adams has to say. He's relying on the people to understand the context by watching all of his communication. And that is a mistake. That's the reason why when things get wildly reported in the media with this rise of social media, the 24 hours news cycle, they don't have time to watch 45 minutes. They don't have time to clip out all the points that he said and the counterpoints to it, they're going to take the headline. Yes, that could be out of context. What added to the problem for Adams was not just the medium of using a YouTube live stream that was long. But he was also citing this dubious poll by Rasmussen. That's what he was using as his source. So it was a tinderbox, it was waiting to go up in flames. But it's that reminder that the medium that you use and how you choose to communicate that is on you. That's definitely happened to me before on social media when I've put out a video on TikTok, three minutes, one minute, whatever it is, I think I've said something perfectly in context, perfectly laid it out. But then you get a couple of commenters right away who take it the wrong way. And because of the algorithm, because of AI and how it works, TikTok takes the negative comments and weights them higher. So when people want to see the comments and make a comment, they see like maybe five negative comments, they go, oh, I took that completely wrong. I thought she meant this. Oh, well, I guess this is what she meant. So it's a combination of those two things too. Sometimes the algorithm isn't working in your favor, but the way that I look at it is okay, if people don't understand what I'm saying, I have to take this down because it's on me. It's on me to communicate that effectively and it was on Scott Adams to communicate it effectively as well. So in every podcast episode, I leave you with one easy to remember take away indestructible PR tip and here it is. You always hear the phrase, know your audience, know your audience, but you also need to know your medium. You need to understand how you best communicate, where you best communicate and where can you communicate with the most reach, most engagement if those are the goals that you're going after. But if you want to be fully understood, you have to understand in this social media, 24 hour news cycle environment, yes, people do look for headlines, people look for quotes, people look for quotable content quotes. And people can be taken out of context at any time. Scott Adams could have been taken out of context, but the reason why he's cancelled is everything he said was in the context of what he meant to say. That's all for this week on the podcast. Bye for now.