An easy lesson in crisis communications
Whether you agree with student protestors or not, it's clear that Ohio State's poor handling of the situation has turned a one-night story into an ongoing saga.
I have what multiple medical professionals have diagnosed as “a completely normal brain.”
That’s why, with one foot in the grave at 37 years old, I don’t overly concern myself with the opinions of college students as long as they’re not marching through campus hoisting swastika flags.
My reaction to learning Ohio State students wanted to start a pro-Palestine encampment on campus would have been to let them have a go as long as they weren’t blocking sideways or intimidating passersby. Other than that, I would have gone about my day thanks to having the aforementioned “normal brain.”
But I’m not looking to kowtow to influential donors like Ohio State President Ted Carter, who went crying to Governor DeWine and the Ohio State Highway Patrol for more muscle to flex against peaceful protestors.
The pro-Palestine crowd could have barricaded themselves in a campus building, as happened at Cal Poly Humboldt County. They could have responded by kettling the Highway Patrol when they moved to arrest protestors, as happened in Illinois Urbana-Champagne.
Instead, the Ohio State protestors sat down in the middle of a green public space and were beaten into submission by the Highway Patrol. The videos of police aggression traveled much further than those of what would have been an otherwise peaceful protest.
One viral tweet garnered over four million views on Twitter, though—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—it was unfair to the Columbus Division of Police.
The city cops’ much-ballyhooed “Dialogue Team” responded to the Neo-Nazi protest at Landgrant in the summer of 2023. The Ohio State Highway Patrol did the damage to the pro-Palestine contingent on Friday night. Those are two separate entities to those scoring at home.
We won’t know for sure until we get the public records of communications between Ohio State and law enforcement agencies, but I suspect the Columbus Division of Police refused to bust up the pro-Palestine encampment because they understood it would be an optics nightmare. That’s what happened at Columbia’s encampment.
I suspect Ohio State then turned to the Ohio Highway Patrol, most of whose members were probably excited to do something other than write tickets to speed motorists along our interstates. You’ll rarely see a cop more excited than at the prospect of cracking the skulls of college students with leftist political opinions.
Regardless, Ohio State even added to the public relations nightmare by lying about the presence of snipers watching the protest.
From Arianna Smith of The Lantern:
Around 8:15 p.m. Thursday, university spokesperson Ben Johnson said there were no armed law enforcement officers on the Ohio Union's roof with weapons pointed at students and community members protesting the war in Gaza, which was correct at the time.
According to information obtained Friday, Johnson said once the troopers began using force on the students around 10 p.m., the state troopers on the roof switched to long-range firearms as part of their protocol.
This is a great example of how powerful entities like Ohio State will lie during crisis communications. They aren’t snipers! Don’t be hysterical. They’re merely observers with long rifles waiting nearby for when the arrests start. It’s a totally different thing,
But lies like that make it harder to believe Ohio State when it says 20 of the 36 arrested were unaffiliated with the university, especially when they refuse to disclose the identity of those arrested or the charges against them.
From George Shillcock of wosu.org:
OSU spokesperson Ben Johnson said in a statement that of the three dozen people arrested, 20 were not affiliated with the university and 16 were students. Johnson did not disclose any identities or charges, but OSU police told protestors multiple times during the evening they would be arrested and charged with criminal trespassing if they did not disperse.
Even if all that is true, 20 of the arrestees being unaffiliated with Ohio State isn’t some sort of gotcha, as those aligned against the protest would have you believe. There is a much higher percentage of “unaffiliated” with the university at Buckeye football games.
Besides, Ohio State is a public university funded with public money. You don’t have to be a student to go sit on the Oval and drink vodka out of a Gatorade bottle or protest for justice in Palestine. It’s not like anybody arrested was caught looting buildings or causing bodily harm to anyone.
And now, thanks to President Carter using the state’s monopoly on violence against Ohio State students, he’s effectively turned a one-night story into a week-long story as the arrests appear to have calcified the protest movement.
Again, if I were Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein, I’d simply dismiss the charges stemming from unlawful arrests and wash my hands of the matter entirely. We’ll see if Klein has those kinds of “progressive” gravitas later this morning when the arrestees appear in court.
But the campus arrests are also sending protestors to the City Council meeting tonight, which was already going to be heated considering the council’s plans to rush through a new contract with the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #9 in a single meeting.
You can read more about the cop contract ordeal from Columbus City Council Review, who may or may not be my beautiful husband.
And now, thanks to the actions of Ohio State, pro-Palestine residents will descend on City Hall once again—mere weeks after City Council passed a tepid ceasefire resolution that didn’t even mention the word “Israel” as the death toll in Gaza climbed above 30,000—mostly women and children.
And I’ll be there no matter what.
Because the Ohio State Administration can say what it wants. The response to the protest was driven by the fact that, collectively, it vehemently disagreed with the protestors' opinions on Palestine.
It’s hard to envision that response happening to anyone protesting anything else, but maybe next time, the pro-Palestine crowd will have the smarts to protest in a yet-to-be-discovered manner that appeases their critics while also effectively getting their message across.
Until then, it’s wild to me that Ohio State pays $200,000 a year to communications gurus like Ben Johnson.
If those are the results, I’d like to volunteer to do that job for half the salary because the No. 1 rule of crisis communications is you never turn a one-day story into a two-day story.
Will the university learn its lesson this time? Consider me skeptical!
Odds & Ends
Registration for free Statehouse tours from yours truly will open to brave and noble subscribers to The Rooster on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to meeting some of you and filling your skulls with obscure facts about our cursed Statehouse.
A patriot attended the Secretary of State’s Small Business Cybersecurity Summit on Friday. During the keynote, the patriot, who was sitting right behind the Secretary of State, witnessed Frank LaRose watching Instagram Reels about people acting as “human furniture.” We’ll need a team of psychologists to unpack that one.
Ohio’s medical marijuana dispensaries prep for recreational sales, which are slated to begin as early as June 15th.
Andrew Tobias of cleveland.com published a detailed explainer of how FirstEnergy funneled dark money to Ohio’s top politicians in the lead-up to the passage of HB-6… leading me to ask, “Now, why would it do such a thing!?”
Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rich Cordray is leaving the Joe Biden Administration after overseeing a disastrous student loan rollout. I’ll never forgive the Ohio Democratic Party and its primary voters for ordaining Corday over Youngstown soldier Joe Schiavoni in 2018. Oh, what could have been!
Shocking: Ohio’s top public schools come from wealthy suburbs.
THOSE WMDs. Don’t believe what they’re telling you about misinformation… The Devil went down to Georgia… The children who lost limbs in Gaza… Inside Yo Gotti’s $100 million music empire… How a bankrupt bettor became a bookie at the center of an MLB betting scandal.
Quote DJ Byrnes from Crisis Communications: It’s hard to envision that response happening to anyone protesting anything else, but maybe next time, the pro-Palestine crowd will have the smarts to protest in a yet-to-be-discovered manner that appeases their critics while also effectively getting their message across."
Harken back to spring quarter 1970 at OSU, DJ. All we were doing was protesting the Vietnam war, trying to get ROTC off campus, trying to get cirriculum to be relevant for black students, etc. I realize this was before you were born, DJ. Students were killed at KSU, which ramped up everything. Not only was the State Patrol called in, shooting us with rubber bullets and kicking asses, but the Ohio National Guard, too, all teargassing us. So yes, I can and did envision it, breathe it. Those days radicalized me forever.
Thanks for the link to the Otani betting scandal. These problems will only get worse with legalized gambling but hey not our problem right? About the protests going on at OSU and other campuses good for the students to use their voices to support their causes! But DeWine and the other governors they want the protest to show that we need to crack down on dissent. It’s 1968 all over again. 🙏