The Hannah Report: Faces on Capitol Squar – Mark Weaver

Speaking to crisis communications expert and political consultant Mark Weaver, Hannah News asked, "Is it a matter of choosing the right words, or is it expressing them in a smooth and confident manner?"

"I would say resonance, right? That's probably the word I would look for," he replied.

Having previously worked as a political advisor in 28 states, a prosecuting attorney, and a professor at the University of Akron and the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Weaver now dedicates the majority of his time to leading his crisis communications firm Communications Counsel, where he offers advice to legal teams, businesses, politicians and organizations on how to defend themselves in the public sphere when they are facing potential damage to their reputations.

"Almost all of our work in crisis communications involves an individual or an organization who has a reputational risk like a lawsuit, like a workplace incident, or like some government action that's about to undermine their success as an organization. …

"I tell all my clients that if you lose in the court of law, you have a few appeals, but if you lose in the court of public opinion, there are probably no appeals, and there's a lot more judges. Yeah, there are a lot more judges."

He continued, "Sometimes it's false allegations against a person. That was the case with this client I dealt with yesterday and essentially wrapped up the work for them, where somebody had falsely accused a business owner of saying something racist on the Internet. That did not happen, but the Internet said it did, so we had to help that professional, it was a medical professional, through his work of convincing his patients and others that he was not involved with this.

"Other times it might be a corporation or an organization that's been sued, and the other side is out in the press saying things about the lawsuit, and our client might not know what to say. … They need someone who understands the court of public opinion, and that's us. So there's several law firms in Ohio that will bring us in to advise them not on how to try the case in the court of law -- that's what they're doing -- but on how to defend the matter in the court of public opinion," he said.

Weaver's clients as a campaign consultant in Ohio have included Gov. Mike DeWine, during DeWine's 2010 run for attorney general, as well as U.S. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH), U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), and former Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery.

"Betty Montgomery, I helped win that race as the first woman attorney general in Ohio," Weaver said.

After working on Montgomery's campaign, she asked Weaver to move to Ohio to work as deputy attorney general for the state.

"So we did. We moved to Ohio. We became Ohioans, and I served as the deputy attorney general for five years helping manage the office, helping manage communications. I did some litigation in the area of public records, the death penalty, a wide variety of things, but mostly helping her with the running of the office."

Other clients have included Mount Carmel Health Systems, where Weaver spearheaded communications for the hospital in its handling of a doctor who in 2019 was charged with killing more than 30 people with overdoses of fentanyl. "He's now on trial for the biggest mass murder case in Central Ohio history," Weaver said.

Growing up outside Philadelphia, Weaver was involved with high-profile, high-stakes communications from the beginning of his career, with one of his first jobs being communications director for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives while attending graduate school at night at Kutztown University. While later studying at the Delaware Law School of Widener University, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to be spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department, where he said he briefed the national press corps on a variety of national justice department matters daily. This led to a career in political consulting in Washington D.C., where he advised U.S. senators and representatives on media issues, produced television commercials for them, wrote speeches, and helped with crisis communications.

Though Weaver indicated he has no intentions of running for office himself, he said he enjoys helping people through high-profile crises.

"I've always had a lot of energy," he said.

Over the past several months, Weaver has focused his work on crisis communications, both with his firm and in a virtual speaking tour, where he's been conducting webinars on effective crisis communications amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as crisis communications surrounding recent protests following the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd at the hands of police.

He outlined four key factors on how to craft a message in a crisis, saying, "The first one is to listen, because you won't be able to compose your message unless you know what your stakeholders are thinking. The second one is to act quickly, because in a crisis, things are moving so fast, the information is going to be put out there so quickly, and you need to keep up with that information flow. The third one is to tell the truth, because we always want to be truthful and give our facts. And then the fourth one is to do the right thing. Doing the right thing differs depending on the situation. But the reason I stress that as the fourth one is, you could have the best messaging in the world, but if the information you're providing is the wrong thing to do, it will not resonate with your stakeholders. So having a well-worded statement or perfectly produced video, and choosing the right list for distribution, and having the right messenger give the message -- those things can all be right on target. But if what you're saying and doing is not the right thing for your stakeholders, then your crisis communications effort will fail."

Regarding recent protests, Weaver said that the most effective messaging is tailored with an organization's stakeholders in mind.

"People who are not nuanced or particularly knowledgeable about the area of crisis communications might think, well, 'Whatever the protestors are asking for is what you should say you should do.' … An organization needs to discern who its stakeholders are, what the best thing for the largest part of those stakeholders is, and then start messaging behind that initiative. And sometimes that will be what the protestors are asking for, and sometimes that won't be what the protestors are asking for, because it depends on who's protesting and whether they represent the interests and the concerns of the majority of the stakeholders."

Earlier in his career as a campaign manager, Weaver produced television and radio ads for candidates and advised candidates on messaging, speaking and effective social media communications.

"When we did Mike DeWine's race for attorney general in 2010, Mike DeWine was a brand name in Ohio politics; people knew who he was," Weaver said. "He had been defeated for the Senate in 2006 by Sherrod Brown. And so messaging for Mike DeWine involved reacquainting Ohioans with the legal background of Mike DeWine. He had started his career as a prosecutor in Greene County, but most Ohioans remembered him from his service in Congress. So in that case, it wasn't getting Mike DeWine known, it was reacquainting Ohioans with his work as a prosecutor, which helped him get elected attorney general."

Weaver acknowledged a heightened level of vitriol in the political sphere in recent years, but he said the best political messaging is not nasty.

 As an example of his style of messaging, Weaver pointed toward a radio ad he wrote for Westrup's primary race in 2012 against incumbent Jean Schmidt, who is now running for Ohio House District 65, that Weaver said helped secure Wenstrup's congressional seat, which he still holds today.

He said the ad highlighted Schmidt's sitting on the edge of the aisle of the House of Representatives prior to the 2010 State of the Union address and kissing the cheek of President Barack Obama, who in 2010 was extremely unpopular among Republicans.

"So we made a radio ad that was kind of lighthearted about it -- that she'd given this little kiss on the cheek as a way of indicating that she was sort of friendly to his agenda. And that was our major political media expenditure in 2012. We did very little else. We had almost no money, and we defeated her. Largely because Brad's a great candidate and had a great set of credentials, but that particular ad cut through the clutter, and people understood that she had gone Washington, that she had lost her way. She was no longer really fighting in the trenches for Southwest Ohio; she'd become part of the beltway. And that ad was not unethical, it was not illegal, it was funny, it was appropriate, it was true, and it resonated with Republican primary voters in Southwest Ohio. They elected Brad Wenstrup in her place, and he's been there ever since."

When asked whether current divides within political parties present challenges, Weaver acknowledged that both parties have fissures.

"Our friends the Democrats are torn by hard-left radicals who hate America on the far edge of their party and more mainstream Democrats who are more traditionally liberal. That's their fissure. Our fissure right now is really surrounding the president. You know, 90 percent of our party supports this president, and 10 percent doesn't, and the 10 percent that doesn't is very vocal, and our former Gov. John Kasich would be in that camp."

When asked about how effective policymaking can be accomplished with intra- and inter-party divides, Weaver urged the rejection of a "win-at-any-cost" mentality.

"There is a professional way of doing things. I've mentored a lot of political operatives in my career, and what I tell younger operatives is: your reputation matters, and you will run into the same people over and over again throughout your career. So, starting out on the wrong foot, where you're going to do something unethical or illegal, or maybe go too hard against somebody who doesn't deserve that hard of a hit against them, that will come back and undermine your ability to be effective later.

"If we started with that premise, we get some progress in the tenor of politics in modern America. Sadly, each party is so driven by its extremes, that when they come together to legislate, neither side is willing to compromise much, and this has been building for years. This is not unique to the last few years."

He went on to comment on the declining power of political parties in favor of increasingly self-driven legislators.

"Party leaders of days gone by often spoke to one another, and had great backchannel working relationships with one another, and could find a way to get things done. With the party's influence on the downtrend, we're seeing each candidate work independently of any party and win, and that often lends itself to legislatures full of people who feel they don't have an allegiance to anybody except whatever their personal political agenda is. …

"Our founders designed our American political system so that we can only get things done if we are willing to compromise. When someone criticizes legislative gridlock as if that's a problem, that person fails to recognize that gridlock is a feature of the system built in on purpose. The only legislation that should get passed is that which can garner broad support. So if legislators, whether we're talking in the state legislature or in Congress, want to get something done, they're going to have to reach across the aisle and get enough votes to pass something with votes from both sides. And if you simply wait on getting the majority and only do what your party wants, that works for a short while until the other party gets the majority and does the same thing. So legislative gridlock is actually a reminder to us that the legislation offered needs to have broad support in order to get policy done."

On national politics, Weaver said the nation's current state of crisis lends support to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, despite Biden's being a "weak" candidate on several fronts.

"Someone who's been in and around federal government since 1972 is not a particularly strong voice for change in a country that wants change. And his abilities as a candidate have diminished over the decades. As somebody who has watched Joe Biden from afar throughout my career, there was a time when he was a skilled orator and could make a strong political message. He has lost that ability. If and when the spotlight moves to Biden's diminished capacity as a political messenger and his very dubious record on a variety of issues, then we will see advantage Trump. Right now, because America is torn apart by pandemic and protests, the focus is squarely on the president, which means, until things change, it's advantage Biden."

He emphasized that he is not an advisor for President Trump, but he said White House press corps coverage of Trump has been extremely critical.

"I've never seen anything quite like it. It's not to say he doesn't deserve scrutiny, of course he does, and it's not to say he hasn't made mistakes, he certainly has. It's -- some of the media coverage out of Washington about this president is so breathless and over-the-top that it feels like it was written by the Democratic National Committee. And although that in the short run is a problem for Donald Trump, the curtain has been drawn back for many voters as to the biases of the press in a way that has sadly made the media not trustworthy to folks. And so their ability to bring to their readers and viewers a story about this president has been hamstrung by their eagerness to trip him up. As a result, people are seeking information elsewhere. That's one of the reasons why social media is such an important force in modern politics."

But Trump has meanwhile been assisting his critics by not being careful with his messaging, Weaver said.

"We call this 'lack of message discipline.' We prefer our candidates to have message discipline, which means you identify which messages are the most important ones for your target voters to hear about and you try to talk about those messages. I don't know that Joe Biden is any better at that, but we'll see. Right now the president needs to get back on message and be disciplined about how he's on message, and that will be important if he wants to win reelection."

At the time of this interview, Weaver was on a writing retreat in New Zealand, where he was working on his second book, a novel. When asked what's next for him, he said he would continue speaking about crisis communications and about his first book, "A Wordsmith's Work," a guide for persuasive writing. And he will continue working with Communications Counsel, where, despite lauding his staff, he says he still plays an active role.

"The ones that are the most difficult puzzles to solve tend to come to me. And so, we plan on doing this. We have fun doing it, we work with good people, and we enjoy helping folks who are trying to defend their reputation in the court of public opinion."

Story originally published in The Hannah Report on August 24, 2020.  Copyright 2020 Hannah News Service, Inc.