Why Silence Is Also A Crime

One of the biggest headlines this week circled around Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice and a video that recently surfaced documenting him physically abusing his wife Janay Rice. On Monday, TMZ released elevator footage from Revel Atlantic City in February earlier this year that shows Rice assaulting his then-fiancee, rendering her unresponsive, then attempting to drag her out of the elevator. Prior to the video surfacing, the National Football League only sentenced Rice to a two game suspension but has since suspended him indefinitely from the league. 

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The public also hasn't taken too kindly to this recent discovery. This week alone Rice has been eliminated from his high school's hall of fame, removed from videos shown during Rutgers University football games, taken out of the upcoming NFL Madden video game by EA Sports, and sparked a powerful Twitter discussion under the tag #WhyIStayed. Baltimore Ravens owner has also written a letter to publicly apologize and the team is offering an exchange for Ray Rice jerseys. 

While it may sound like justice was served, a source revealed to the Associated Press that NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, had knowledge of the video back in April, despite denying that he had any access to the footage. While no significant progress has been made just yet, the Commissioner is now under fire and facing plenty of public scrutiny. However, it never had to get to this point. 

Public scrutiny is a result of public relations failure. What Goodell needed, in addition to some much needed empathy, was transparency. Had he been open, honest, and apologetic from the beginning, he, and the NFL by extension, would have never faced such heavy public criticism. Only time will tell if Goodell will also be punished for the crimes he has committed in these events as well. 

Samsung’s PR Woes Continue

Just this summer, Samsung was in court defending itself against Apple and it now finds itself in the court of public opinion against tech bloggers.  In the actual court case, Apple claimed that Samsung had copied the iPhone.  Samsung lost in court and now owes Apple 1 billion dollars.

As this story began to fade from the tech spotlight, another story unraveled.  This time two bloggers claimed that Samsung had threatened to strand them at a tech conference in Berlin if they did not write stories depicting Samsung in a positive light.  Samsung had paid for these bloggers to attend the conference.

Samsung later released this statement: “Samsung Mob!lers is a voluntary community of active Samsung mobile device users, who are offered the opportunity to participate in our marketing events across the world.  At these events, all activities they undertake are on a voluntary basis.  No activities are forced upon them.

We regret [that] there was a misunderstanding between the Samsung Mob!lers coordinators and the relevant blogger, as we understand he was not sufficiently briefed on the nature of Samsung Mob!lers’ activities at IFA 2012.  We have been attempting to get in touch with him.

We respect the independence of bloggers to publish their own stories.”

The statement that Samsung released seems to tiptoe around the issue and not admit what the real problem was between the bloggers and Samsung.  It may have come off as more genuine if the company directly addressed the severity of the issue.  At a time when Samsung is under such intense competition with other tech companies, it is also necessary that they take steps to make sure they stay out of the spotlight for negative reasons this fall. 

Do you think Samsung’s statement was a sufficient response to the incident? Let us know!

This guest blog post was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member Kyra Mazurek