I read two items in two PR blogs today, both of which talked about PR crises.

First was BL Ochman, whose What’s Next tells the tale of ZDNet asking readers if the latest Internet Explorer security patches issued by Microsoft is enough to get them to switch to Firefox. Second was Steve Crescenzo’s Corporate Hallucinations, recounting how Ketchum Public Relations, which has an account with the US Department of Education, paid $240,000 in tax dollars to “a prominent black pundit to promote Bush???s ‘No Child Left Behind’ act on his show, and to encourage other black journalists to do the same thing.”

Both stories were called PR crises. Only one was.

The Microsoft story is a business crisis. PR had nothing to do with the company’s failure to fix its browser or meet customer needs. To be sure, the communicators at Microsoft have to deal with the fallout, but that doesn’t make it a PR crisis. That’s the kind of thing PR people are paid to cope with. It reminds me of a converastion I had (and wrote about) with Wilma Matthews, who was asked what kind of crisis communication plans she was developing in the event her organization (Arizona State University) was attacked by terrorists. What a stupid question, she said. A terrorist attack is not a communication crisis and you can’t plan for it.

You might make the argument that the ZDNet poll makes it a PR crisis, since it’s now in the media. I stand pat on the notion that PR is doing its job by addressing a business crisis. It also was not a crisis when Enron imploded, no matter how much bad press that disaster produced. Communication didn’t create the crisis, criminal business behaviors did.

The Department of Education story, on the other hand, is a PR crisis because Ketchum’s unethical approach to building support for President Bush’s education policies unleashed the story. As Steve writes:

What???s odd about this entire thing is that the silence out of the Ketchum camp has been deafening. As far as I can tell, they have put their organizational head firmly in the sand, and are running from the situation. As you???ll see if you read the full story, Ketchum is referring all calls to the Department of Education. Yes, that???s right. The media relations specialists are referring all calls to the client.  Oh, and as if PR agencies needed more of a black eye, here???s another quote from the USA Today story: ???Williams’ contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum that produced ???video news releases??? designed to look like news reports.??? Boy, that doesn???t make the profession look too slimy, does it?

Yeah, it does, and hance it’s a PR crisis.

The media have taken to calling any business crisis a PR crisis, and now it seems we in the profession are falling into the same trap. Let’s reserve the label of “PR crisis” for the real thing and call everything else what it is. We get a bad enough rap as it is without taking the blame for things that aren’t our fault.