Some of you may have seen that the Twitterverse, and the internet more generally, has a new Outrage of the Day to focus on.
A woman by the name of Justine Sacco, making a business trip to South Africa, posted the following on her Twitter account just before her plane left London for Capetown:
Nice!
Of course, as has become common practice in cases like this, the online reaction was swift and merciless. The tweet became an instant sensation, and Sacco was vilified from all corners of the globe. Even worse, as Gawker so nicely put it, the fact that she was on a twelve-hour international flight gave “the internet an inordinate amount of time to gather its torches.”
The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet was attached to the story on Twitter, and when Justine did, in fact, land, an enterprising young South African man even managed to interview her waiting father and grab a picture of her.
Anyway, while i find the story vageuly amusing, in the usual internet-catastrophe sort of way, i didn’t really open the thread to pile on the woman for the content of her message. Plenty of morons post stupid and offensive things on the internet, and if i got worked up about all of them, i’d develop an ulcer. There’s not much on the web that shocks me anymore.
What does amaze me, though, is that this woman’s job is (was?) global Director of Communications for IAC, a large company with extensive media holdings, including TV stations, internet video service Vimeo, and dating sites Match.com and OKCupid.
Yes, she is in public relations. Her whole job, her whole career, revolves around creating and controlling the public image of her company and the people within it. This is someone who, presumably, has to sign off on things like media releases, interviews, statements, and other brand-related publicity in an effort to construct the best possible image for her company and its products.
Did this person not consider, even for a moment, the consequences of making a public statement that not only made light of AIDS in Africa, but doubled down by explicitly racializing the problem and implying that, for someone white, it wasn’t a concern? Jesus Christ on a Cracker.
The folks at Gawker suggest that “a bad AIDS joke likely won’t keep a good PR person down for too long,” but if i were an employer looking for a PR person, it’s not actually the joke itself that would be my biggest concern. I’d be more worried about hiring a PR director who apparently has no clue about how public relations works on the internet.
I can see her at a meeting to roll out a new product: “OK, so we’ve got the TV advertising all set up. As for social media, just go ahead and tweet whatever dumb idea comes into your head. We’ll deal with the fallout later.” Genius!