The sexual abuse scandal involving a now-sacked presidential spokesman has exposed another big hole in the governance system of the Blue House.
The first hole needs no further explanation. A series of personnel appointment debacles by President Park Geun-hye a couple of months ago showed that the presidential office lacked a system that could help her pick the right person for the right post. This hole still needs to be plugged.
The newly identified hole concerns crisis management. The way the groping scandal has played out shows there is no crisis management system in place in Cheong Wa Dae. This is obvious even to an observer with no expertise in handling a public relations crisis.
The presidential aides involved in the scandal acted in a totally unprofessional way, helping it spiral out of control. Of course, the incident would not have taken place in the first place had Yoon Chang-jung, the disgraced former presidential spokesman, behaved himself.
But even after the scandal broke, the fallout could have been contained had there been an effective crisis management system. Damage would have been controlled had the presidential aides involved had some basic understanding of crisis management.
The first principle in managing a crisis is to be honest. Any attempt to cover things up only complicates the matter. But none of the presidential aides handling the crisis followed this principle.
They tried to patch up the situation by offering ambiguous explanations and apologies. But this simply made matters worse. Their explanations have given the impression that they were neither on top of the crisis nor were telling the full truth. As a result, their apologies sounded empty.
So Park had to apologize over her former spokesman’s misconduct. Apologizing to the public Monday, Park said she would use the incident as a chance to set discipline among the presidential staff. This is obviously necessary to prevent the recurrence of similar disasters.
Park also said that should a similar incident happen again, the senior secretaries involved would be also held accountable. But she needs to go beyond just putting out a warning. She needs to accept at least the resignation of Lee Nam-ki, her senior press secretary and Yoon’s boss, for mishandling the incident from the beginning.
To minimize the damage when similar fiascos have occurred, it is necessary to create a crisis management team at Cheong Wa Dae headed by a public relations professional. Otherwise, effective and coherent responses will be difficult.
The sexual abuse scandal has given Park a serious challenge. She needs to take care to navigate it, but she should also remember that she faces many other important challenges.
More than anything, she has to focus on reviving the economy. She needs to see to it that the measures the government is pushing to stimulate the economy are implemented as intended.
