Watch yo’ mouth!

Perhaps it’s just a personal pet-peeve, but I get really upset and frustrated when people whose opinions carry weight are allowed to sound off publicly on things that they’ve obvious not chosen to be well educated about.  As a PR person, I find that the best advice is to keep your mouth closed if you’re not well-versed on the ins-and-outs of a situation.

Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes Magazine really needs a personal PR coach to work with him so that he doesn’t over-reach his areas of knowledge when speaking publicly.  Rich writes the Digital Notes blog for Forbes and during a recent World Affairs Council Houston Chapter event at which he spoke (which was shown on C-SPAN), he basically said he’d rather have foreign auto makers in right to work states continue to flourish and let US automakers die.  All because of delinquency rates at work.  That’s insane!  He’d rather let a major part of our nation’s culture and economic base wither and die because he doesn’t like it that the unions protect people who show up for work!

While it’s obviously a pet-peeve of mine that anyone could speak this way about the industry I work for (I was recently engaged in this discussion on LinkedIn), I think it’s worse for him to publicly condemn an industry that he’s obviously got only fragments of information about.  Luckily for him, this was only C-SPAN and viewership there is pretty low.  Imagine, however, how terrible his life might be if he’d said this on the NBC Nightly News or another more watched outlet?

I guess the take-away lesson here is to always, always take care with what you say, whether you think it’s a small private discussion or a nationally televised program.  You never know who might see and call your bluff.  If you’ve got the knowledge and data to back you up, if you’re willing to engage in the hard discussions and stand your ground, more power to you.  But if you’re under-educated on a topic; if you don’t know any facts or figures beyond the one you’ve taken to heart, please, just beg pardon and don’t answer!