Expertos aconsejan a Cain: cierra la boca

The Fix:

On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain declared “enough said” about the swirl of questions surrounding allegations of sexual harassment leveled at him during his time as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.

He then appeared on PBS’s “Newshour” and Greta van Susteren’s program on Fox News Channel that night. Then on Tuesday he gave an on-air interview with CNN’s Headline News and appeared not once but twice (!) on Fox News on Tuesday evening.

While Cain almost certainly justifies such high-profile appearances as the best way to get his side of the story out, the problem he has run into is that his side of the story keeps changing. And that means that every time he goes on television, he is creating more questions than he’s answering.

“Cain should give up his shovel and stop digging the hole with these interviews,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican communications consultant. “When the room is on fire, you want to starve it of oxygen.”

The temptation to do otherwise is strong, though, and there are any number of recent examples of politicians who tried to use the media to solve their problems and wound up making them much, much worse.

(...) “Ultimately, crisis communications is about survival,” said Brian Jones, a former communications director at the Republican National Committee and now a principal in the Black Rock Group. “Repeatedly re-litigating the story and injecting new facts only fuels the story while also casting doubts on the truthfulness of the pushback.”

In other words: Get your story straight and stick to it. And that’s the opposite of what Cain did in the first 48 hours of this controversy.

It’s possible that Cain will start heeding the advice of the crisis communications professionals some time soon. But, at the moment, he is doing himself far more harm than good with his repeated media appearances.