Birthday boy
. Twitter post from last year:
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Our old friend Edward Coram-Jones, PR Expert is back experting in an article comparing Huw’s crisis to that of Phil Schofield and James Martin:
Edward Coram-James, from Go Up, believes that ITV and best pal Holly "threw Phillip under the bus", while Huw Edwards' wife's response 'saved' his career, and that James Martin learned 'cues' from Flind that saw him escape further public scrutiny…
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None of them should have resulted in permeant damage to their careers. Feathers lost? Absolutely. Lives destroyed? Absolutely not," Ed began. "In my opinion, when looking at the three different crises, Martin's is the most serious, followed by Edwards, followed by Schofield.
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None of them should have resulted in permeant damage to their careers. Feathers lost? Absolutely. Lives destroyed? Absolutely not," Ed began. "In my opinion, when looking at the three different crises, Martin's is the most serious, followed by Edwards, followed by Schofield.
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This might seem like an odd statement. If you asked any punter on the street to rank these three men based on the seriousness of what they did, almost universally people would claim that it was Schofield, followed by Edwards, followed by Martin. However, this perception is not based on the facts surrounding the crises, but on the fallout from those crises: how they were reported and how the principals reacted. There is a significant disparity between the on-paper scale of the actual crises, and the scale of the crises as they were reported."
When it comes to what happened with
Phillip Schofield, Ed argues there was a degree of homophobia with the public outcry. But what didn't help was those around him, he says, with Holly admitting on national TV that she had been left "shaken, troubled, let down and worried" amid the scandal.
"You only have to look at the fallout from the Schofield saga and the double standards in terms of society's response to, say, Huw Edwards, to see that Schofield had every reason to fear the potential for unfair and inflated scrutiny of his private life…" Ed continued. "He was also a well-loved and famous television personality, and thus even more open to unbalanced criticism.
"Most ordinary folk would have lied about having an affair, and he had much more to lose in his affair than most ordinary folk. He was abandoned and thrown under the bus by his protegee and friend, Willoughby, abandoned by his employers, fired by the talent agency that he had remained loyal to… was the affair inappropriate? Yes. Affairs are always inappropriate. Aside from his wife, his younger colleague and himself, was it anyone else's business? In my opinion, absolutely not."…
"I don't believe that, from a crisis comms point of view, there was any good reason for Willoughby not to close ranks around her old friend and mentor. Doing so would have had the same cooling effect as Flind's statement had about Edwards." Ed claims that when the speculation was mounting against Edwards, it looked as though his world was about to implode on him. But the way his inner circle responded was his saviour.
"Social media was awash with rumours about who the BBC presenter was. A witch hunt, in the truest sense, had begun. However, even when the engine was seeming to be gaining more and more momentum, Edwards' inner circle closed ranks around him quickly and decisively. His wife, Vicky Flind, who one could argue is one of the only people whose business her husband's alleged behaviour actually is, defended him vociferously.
"In one short and sharp but human and balanced statement, she underlined his struggles with mental health, reminded the world that it was no one's business, and demanded privacy for him and her family. It worked. Celebrities and colleagues jumped to his defence, setting
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The public and media reacted accordingly. The public is often very empathetic when it comes to human struggle and very compassionate when it comes to the mental health issues of others. By humanising Edwards, Flind turned him from being an object of fair game attack to an object of sympathy that people wanted to rally around and defend.
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Had Flind not come to Edwards' defence in a calm, collected but precise way, Edwards' career would be in tatters. Hers was a crisis communications masterclass that defanged social media and The Sun, allowed the BBC to react in a balanced way and paved the way for others to come out and defend him. On the other hand, ITV and Willoughby's handling of the Schofield saga was, in my opinion, the decisive factor in his downfall."
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Those were supposed to be two separate posts but alas, I can’t edit them.
here’s the article:
In the past three months, we have seen three high-profile men in television - Phillip Schofield, Huw Edwards, and James Martin - at the helm of scandal. Their public responses paved the way for very different outcomes, says a PR expert
www.mirror.co.uk
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glasgowguardian.co.uk
www.thesun.co.uk
