Year’s end brings it with it the inevitable parade of lists, top 10 this and worst that. The end of a decade merely exacerbates the need that compels so many to create these lists. 

One of the more intriguing lists I’ve seen so far details the 15 biggest PR disasters of the decade. But the more I read through this (and other) lists, the more I wondered: What constitutes a PR disaster?

Looking at the incidents covered on most lists, it would seem to be any event that got bad press. But PR isn’t about creating the illusion that everything in an organization is 100% hunky dory 100% of the time. It’s about building strong relationships with constituent audiences and maintaining a strong reputation.

Companies experience plenty of disasters. There are explosions at factories, oil tankers that spill their loads into ecologically sensitive seas, unethical executives who get caught doing unethical things, stupid executives who get caught doing stupid things, honest mistakes in judgment, and more. It’s wrong, though, to label all of these PR disasters just because they get ink.

It follows, then, that a PR disaster is one in which…

• The organization loses the support of its constituents and finds it harder to engage in its normal activities, or
• The company’s reputation takes a hit so severe that its performance is affected

Even operations or some other function is to blame for the disaster, companies rely on communications to retain stakeholder support and to shore up the company’s reputation. The disaster becomes a PR disaster when communicators make bad decisions (or when the company fails to pay attention to its PR people, as was the case when AIG decided to host a half-million-dollar retreat on the heels of receiving $85 billion in taxpayer bailout money).

By this standard, few of the disasters listed by The Business Insider qualify as true disasters.

Some of the items on the list aren’t PR disasters at all. Take JetBlue’s 2007 nightmare, when the airline kept planes on the runway when others were beating it back to the terminal, stranding passengers for up to 11 hours on cold planes with inadequate food and beverage and backed-up toilets. This was an operational disaster, to be sure, but most consider it a PR triumph, one in which then-CEO Dave Neeleman became the poster boy for authentic direct-to-consumer communication with his now-famous YouTube video. In that video, Neeleman outlined JetBlue’s passenger bill of rights, heading off legislative action that would have likely resulted in even more onerous rules.

More to the point, though, is the fact that JetBlue did not lose customer loyalty and grew even more successful in the wake of the disaster. JetBlue’s tale is about an incident that could have been a PR disaster but, through effective and honest communication, never became one.

That same year, the Cartoon Network had devices with flashing lights placed under bridges, which prompted a panic in Boston as bridges were shut down so authorities could investigate what appeared to be a bomb scare. This led to criminal charges and the departure of Cartoon Network chief Jim Samples. But did viewership of Cartoon Network shows decline? Did advertisers bolt? Did the network’s reputation suffer at all? It seems not.

And so it goes with most of the “disasters” that made the list. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunction” during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl? Lots of complaints ensued (the FCC logged over half a million of them) and the NFL has been careful to book only family-friendly acts, but nobody boycotted the 2005 Super Bowl, as far as I know, and the NFL never took a hit. CBS was fined a record $550,000, but did CBS lose the support of its constituents? Was it harder to conduct business? Other than the fine (a drop in the bucket for a company that made just shy of $14 billion in sales in 2008), the experience doesn’t seem to have had any long-term consequences.

The entries on the list that seem to qualify as true disasters are, in fact, the ones with long-lasting repercussions. The worst of the batch involve ethical breeches, like Merck’s decision to release Vioxx despite preliminary research that the painkiller could result in heart attacks. The 2004 recall of Vioxx after four years on the market cost the company one fortune. Settling litigation cost it another. The company’s reputation plummeted. It lost the support of some of its constituents, and its credibility has suffered a blow from which it has not recovered.

Look at the list for yourself. How many do you think are genuine PR disasters? In my view, most stories labeled PR disasters are really just tempests in teacups, usually because the organization suffered no dire consequences, often because PR came to the rescue.

Which, of course, is one of the reasons companies have PR capabilities to begin with.