The best form of crisis PR is to prevent or curtail a PR crisis before it happens by influencing the editorial decision in your favour; prevention being vastly preferable to an attempted cure.

So how do you do that? The place to start is learning how to deploy the regulatory and legal structures within which the British media are supposed to work. Effective pre-publication/broadcast crisis PR harnesses those protections the way in which they are intended. That requires, firstly, a full knowledge of those protections.

All Fleet Street titles, except the FT, Guardian and Independent, are voluntarily regulated by IPSO, which publishes an Editors' Code by which all editorial decisions are supposed to comply.

Paragraph 1(i) of the Code required that newspapers must take care not to publish inaccurate or misleading material nor headlines not supported by the text. Were newspapers to comply with this obligation, overnight the reliability of our print press would be transformed. The likelihood of this provision being respected increases substantially where the prospect arises that the paper will be held to account for a breach.

The Guardian purports to adhere to an earlier version of the IPSO Code, and has an internal complaints procedure. The FT also has a notionally independent complaints process. The Independent – probably through lack of funds – does not.

For self-interested regulatory and legal reasons, a paper will nearly always provide prior notice to the prospect subject of disparaging editorial content. This is the “golden hour” for effective crisis PR.

All broadcasters are obliged to comply with the OFCOM Code, the primary provision of which for our purposes is at section 7 which obliges broadcasters not to be unfair to those that are the subject of adverse comment. The "golden hour” comes from paragraph 7.11 obliges broadcasters to provide reasonable notice to all those who will be criticised.

Since OFCOM is a much more effective regulator than IPSO (its Code provisions enjoy much greater respect within the broadcast media – which I know has legalled out hundreds of hours of TV content), for every problem you have with a broadcaster you will have at least twenty with newspapers.

The other primary editorial structure is the law of defamation, which is designed not only to protect companies and individuals from false and damaging obligations, but also to protect all of us from fake news in all its forms.

All the industry codes and the law are unanimous that there is no public interest in false information being published on matters of public interest. The prevention of the publication of false information by a PR professional therefore not only serves the best interests of the client, but also the public.

Read last week's tip on influencing the editorial decision