Three children missing for four years, a documentary crew with insider access, a senior police staffer texting the producer a heads-up when Tom Phillips gets shot.
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What next you ask? A NZ Police restructure focused on how police can better “control their own narrative.”
In Wag the Dog, a spin doctor (delighfully played by Dustin Hoffman) manufactures a war to distract from a scandal. It works perfectly until the spin becomes the story. The lesson isn’t that PR is evil, bad, or even wrong. It’s that institutions which confuse narrative control with actual performance eventually get caught holding nothing but their proverbials.
The New Zealand Police just got caught with theirs flapping in the wind. They weren’t just managing the case, they were managing the documentary about the case. The incoming Commissioner told the producer he’d “love to catch up.” A senior communications staffer texted the producer a heads-up (mid-flight!) when Phillips was shot. That’s not a distorted angle. That’s an institution trying to reframe its own failure as someone else’s storytelling problem.
Now, with a public inquiry underway, police are proposing to disestablish communications roles -and- circulated an internal document about controlling “the narrative ensuring the public are exposed to the fundamentals of the organisation rather than the distorted angles sometimes presented by external media sources.” And the Police are also ensuring that it has nothing to do with Tom Phillips. In the immortal words of Tui marketing, “Yeah Right.”
Both stories (will) end, and not because the spin fails but because reality will arrive anyway.
PR Pro Tip:
“Control the narrative” is a symptom, not a #CommsStrategy. The only #narrative that matters here is the public inquiry report due in July. That report won’t care about owned channels, content hubs, or depleted media landscapes. It will care about what happened to three children. And when it lands, a restructure or a new TikTok campaign won’t protect you.