Corporate statements that deserve to be ignored

Is it just my imagination, or is there a predictable pattern to news coverage these days?

The pattern starts with someone accusing, say, Hockey Canada for covering up charges of rape. Or attacking the Canadian Armed Forces for sex discrimination. Or a charity comes under fire for misusing donated dollars. Or a TV program unearths evidence that a renovation firm’s labyrinth of corporate connections is defrauding both its customers and Canada Revenue.

The accusers are willing to go public with their names and faces.

The accused, however, are not. They decline personal interviews. Instead, they issue carefully-worded statements which assert, essentially, that the conduct in question contravenes their code of ethics, didn’t happen, and if it did, won’t happen again.

The language used is numbingly bureaucratic. It avoids facts of any kind.

I wonder what school of communication theory these statement-issuers went to. They don’t seem to realize that there’s a hierarchy in communications. Any communications. But especially in corporate communications.

The specific always outranks the general. The personal always bests the corporate. The emotional always trumps the rational.

Perhaps I can illustrate this principle by digressing into a different form of communication.

Legendary graphics designer Jan White used to teach that there are only three kinds of photos/illustrations in publications.

No. 1 is “oh, by the way” photos. Perhaps the Bank of Canada is raising interest rates. Again. The Bank’s Governor, Tiff Macklem, makes the announcement. So, by the way, this is what he looks like.

No one really cares. It makes no difference to the main story, but his picture adds a visual element.

White’s advice: Make it as small as you can.

No. 2, White taught, is the “thousand words” picture or illustration. As the old adage says — a picture is worth a thousand words. Economists can easily throw a thousand words at fluctuations in commodity prices. A simple graph or chart gets the idea across more quickly and easily.

A map communicates more efficiently than pages of verbal directions.

A diagram of human muscles shows how they work better than any lecture by an anatomist.

White’s advice: Make it big enough to read easily, but no bigger than necessary.

And then No. 3, which White calls, “The Grabber.”

A Grabber photo is always personal. It doesn’t always have to show a face. But it always shows an emotion. A mother crumpled in grief. A runner exalting as he crosses the finish line. A carpenter half hidden in flying sawdust as she cuts lumber. A child rejoicing over a birthday cake.

Surprise. Concentration. Commitment. Anger. Sorrow. Relief. Delight.

Those are the pictures that make the front page. They leap off the page or the screen. You can’t help paying attention. They reach out and grab you.

White’s advice: Play The Grabber as big as you can.

The parallels to news coverage seem obvious to me.

In journalism, human interest stories are The Grabber. We pay attention to a person we can identify with. The harassment victim. The patient shut out of an emergency ward. The kid raising funds for a charity with a lemonade stand.

If we care enough about that person, we’ll read the ho-hum stuff that goes with it.

The ho-hum stuff is the classic straight-forward news report — the impartial gathering of facts, figures, and contributing factors. It’s the “thousand words” that provides the background to put a context around the human-interest story.

It needs to be no more than necessary. Unvarnished facts have to be really startling to become Grabbers.

Those corporate denials, equivocations, alibis and excuses — they’re “oh, by the way” stuff. Basically, who cares? Of course you’re going to deny your organization fouled up!

Corporate statements, to my mind, try NOT to be personal. “The XXX Bank is pleased to announce that…” Who cares, beyond the bank itself?

Denials rarely come from an identifiable face. The wording is always abstract, impersonal.

Following Jan White’s advice, these statements should get as little credence as possible.

Especially anonymous denials.

I accept that some anonymous individuals quoted by the news media — often “not authorized to speak on this matter” — may in fact be believable. B

ut in such cases, I’m trusting the journalists or their organization more than the anonymous source.

The more sources are willing to level with me, to lay bare his struggles or to expose her pain, the more likely I am to believe them.

They grab me; impersonal re-assurances don’t.