It is a strategic and tactical mistake to give an offensive position away to those who will use it to attack, criticize, and blame. Since opponents will undoubtedly attack, criticize, and blame, anyway, the advantages of being proactive, airing one’s own “dirty laundry,” and “telling on oneself” are too significant to ignore. Chief among these advantages is the ability to control the first messages and how a story is first framed. That leaves others having to respond to you instead of the other way around. This approach is appropriately termed “stealing thunder.” When an organization steals thunder, it breaks the news about its own crisis before the crisis is discovered by the media or other interested parties. In experimental research by Arpan and Roskos-Ewoldsen, stealing thunder in a crisis situation, as opposed to allowing the information to be first disclosed by another party, resulted in substantially higher credibility ratings. As significant, the authors found that “credibility ratings associated with stealing thunder directly predicted perceptions of the crisis as less severe.”
* dirty laundry: 치부, 수치스러운 일