Fact-Checking Alert: Grizzlies Could Be Your Waterloo

I recently finished one of the more highly recommended “summer reads” for this season, a book with the simple and, for those of us who live here, resonant title, Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan. The plot is somewhat intriguing and the characters are at least multidimensional if not exactly likable.

Maine is a work of fiction but many of its facts are wrong. For instance, the giant boot in front of L.L. Bean is a hunting boot, not a hiking boot; ripe tomatoes cannot be picked from anyone’s outdoor garden in Maine in mid June; in the 1940s, there’s no way stockings could have “bunched at her knees and sagged around her waist” because panty hose wasn’t invented until the late 50s. These facts are so wrong that I’m inclined to look askance at the entire package.

Around the time I was reading Maine, wondering why anyone would write about watching “grizzly bear cubs climb into the Dumpsters” behind a general store in Cape Neddick, I was also reading in the news about John Wayne’s upbringing in Waterloo, Iowa.

We know now that presidential candidate Michele Bachmann got her John Waynes mixed up. It was not John Wayne, American icon of patriotism and movie stardom, who lived in Waterloo, Iowa, but instead John Wayne Gacy, American killer of young boys. If Bachmann’s invoking of John Wayne was the result of a staff briefing, that was, as we say in the trade, sloppy staff work. If this nugget (as well as not knowing the difference between Concord, MA and Concord, NH) was the work of her own research, then she needs to delegate more.

Candidates, CEOs, and public figures often are given talking points and briefings by staff before public appearances. And just as often, they ignore the briefings and wing it. Sometimes that’s for the best, sometimes that’s a ticket to YouTube infamy. After getting solid reviews in a presidential debate, Ms. Bachmann was back on the road to ridicule because of the Waterloo gaffe.

By the way, if this oft-described Mama Grizzly ever comes to Maine, she’ll be the only one. There are no grizzlies in Maine and there never were. There is, however, the iconic Maine black bear, mascot of the flagship University of Maine. But let’s say you didn’t grow up in nearby Massachusetts and spend summers in the very region about which you’re writing. How would you know the type of bears that do frequent Maine dumpsters (although almost never in York County)? Well, you could look it up. Really, it’s that simple.

Because research is so much easier and faster than it used to be (that’s not to say the Internet doesn’t have its Wiki-Pitfalls) there’s really no excuse for not knowing the birthplace of either a serial killer or the American Revolution. Whether you want to sell a million dollars worth of chick lit or become the ruler of the free world, if you get a few facts wrong, your overall credibility suffers. And suffers.

If the examples I’ve cited are indeed the result of sloppy staff work, let this be a warning to all those budding public relations professionals who aspire to write speeches, speak on the record for their boss, provide talking points, do interview prep, run murder boards, do research, or otherwise become an indispensable right hand to the public power that be.

If you’re responsible for the words that will come out of your boss’s or client’s mouth, or appear above his or her signature, or if you will speak for the boss or do anything that can be ascribed to your boss or your client, do your homework.

If you are the boss, then smarten up.

Felicia Knight is President of Knight Vision International, LLC: www.KnightVisionInternational.com

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Media Relations, Politics, Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


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