I disagree, R104. I don't see how the KP fucked this up particularly. What was said initially was consistent with what she said and what the doctors said.
Kate's own words: "In January, I underwent major abdominal surgery in London. [bold]And at the time it was thought that my condition was non-cancerous.[/bold]. The surgery was successful however tests after the operation found cancer had been present."
So everyone proceeded on the good faith basis the condition was non-cancerous. I did this for a living for twenty years. Put aside the hunger as a public for all the details, which is never going to be satisfied and, out of all the priority stakeholders, is down the list, the job from their perspective was to stick to the known facts. No one worth their salt does anything to encourage speculation in the material they put out, however it's done. So what else should they have said at the initial announcement of her surgery?
Assume the most likely facts at the time: the doctors told her there was no evidence of cancer found during the operation (established cancer can be identified with the naked eye). The tests would have been done out of an abundance of caution. This is consistent with her subsequent treatment: preventative, not curative. Comms probably didn't even know testing was done.
In communications, when you don't know for a fact something is going to happen you don't announce it could. That's feeding pointless speculation. Which is not to say you can prevent pointless speculation but you sure don't help it along. You're expecting the comms team to have a strategy to control the internet and all the fools on it. Impossible task. It cannot be done. Look at now - they're still claiming her announcement video was fake.
The other thing is, you sit with your client and ask them, if you're any good, what do you want this to look like when it's all done? Then you develop a strategy to come as close to that as possible, accepting you can't control every variable (and reminding the client as such.) In this case it's fair to say you had a main client who sought to protect her children first and also maintain the dignity of medical privacy. You had a husband quite reluctant to share the information publicly. Those priorities for client make sense, but they're pretty tricky to manage with the external environment.
No one anticipated the analysis by the news agencies of the photoshopping. It's easy to say in hindsight that they should have. But I know from experience it's the kind of thing you can honestly get caught out on. It was a separate, isolated incident caused by reacting to the external environment, which you always have to be willing to do, whether you like it or not - events, my dear boy, events. But it emerged - it wasn't connected to the announcement at the time of the operation. Photo editing is such an accepted convention now - except what they didn't count on was the agencies' standards around editing integrity. They might not even have known. It's new territory. They might not even have known what she did to edit it or the extent. I have no doubt the entire team is sick they didn't ask for more info but I can see how at the time it didn't happen.
As in war, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. In comms, in this day and age, things will change in ways you might, if you're really lucky, anticipate - but you probably won't imagine all the ways things could change and I'd guess that's what happened here.
I don't know who could have handled these communications flawlessly because I'm not sure the conflict between the clients' objectives and the events made it possible. They did the best they could but so much was out of their control and, barring giving media and the public exactly what they want (in defiance of the client) there are no easy answers. It would be hard to say to a woman with cancer and three young children you need to tell all. They had to wait until the client was ready. And that is the client's right, come what may.
