Obvious Lying Tends to be a Bad Public Relations Tactic

Yesterday, in this post, I discussed a videotaped interview that RTÉ conducted with Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn, who babbled an unusually large amount of vicious bullshit, even by his usual standards.

Today, that video is gone. Go look.

RTÉ apparently figured out that they had been used as a vessel for a series of dishonest and personally nasty claims that were easily disproved. Good for them, but if only they had figured it out before they posted the video in the first place.

Or, better yet, if only Jack Dunn hadn't told such obvious lies in the first place. But let's not hope for the impossible.

Bottom line: Boston College is scrambling, because their position is crumbling. They are becoming reckless, and their PR maneuvers are becoming untenable. They should stop. They should just stop. They are trying to control the damage done to the institution by a series of their own failures, and they are, I think, trying to protect themselves from their own perception of their failures. That effort to push away the perception of failure is causing the failure to metastasize. They should face it, concede it, and examine it.

The point has come at which nothing is more harmful than the institutional insistence on seeing a significant failure as primarily a public relations problem that can be massaged through messaging.