I was so sad and disappointed to read this post. And worried too. Is this a sign of things to come?
by an anonymous comms pro
I work in a communications team in local Government, and we’ve recently been experiencing a public response to a severe reputational issue that’s brought my organisation and my colleagues into focus.
The residents where we live have been rightly upset about this issue. For some, however, upset has turned to anger and anger into abuse.
Anger at decisions made in the past and at councillors has been strong, but what I didn’t expect was the anger to reach our communications team.
It started with groups of our residents finding out who works in our team through our LinkedIn profiles. Sharing our names and photos amongst each other to reveal the “Spin Doctors” doing the organisation's dirty work. It was unsettling at first but sadly nothing many people had not experienced before. Weirdly, It sort of felt like part of the job.
Our residents then started to get invited onto national news programmes so they could air their grievances to a bigger audience. One such programme asked us for a response to a pending interview they were going live with. I was tasked with providing this response and sent one to them to come from a standard ‘spokesperson’.
On the night of the interview the presenter of the programme read out our response but to my surprise as well as only reading out certain lines from it, cutting and choosing as he wished, he read it out as if it had been my words, revealing my name as the author. On the topic being discussed, it was tough to have my name announced as the person seemingly defending our organisation. But the larger worry was that the invisible line in the sand seemed to have disappeared. When media organisations no longer respect things like saying a quote is from a spokesperson, not just from whoever sent the email, let alone reading the full thing accurately, it’s concerning.
As time has gone on people from across my organisation have been subject to threats, harassment on social media, videos attacking them and more. This is a non-stop week in week out campaign of abuse. Police intervention and the following court proceedings have done little to slow down those determined enough to keep on the attack.
You might think I’m overreacting. But to me these feel like small steps toward allowing a targeting of communications professionals, announcing it’s ok to name and shame us for doing our job. Incidents like these have happened to several of my colleagues, and sadly, my female colleagues seem to get the worst of it.
Where I work, in local government, threats and intimidation feel like they're becoming normalised. It makes me worry about where things are heading.
Have you experienced anything similar? Let me know at darrencaveney@gmail.com
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