Any way they spin it
William Watson says the reaction to forthrightness from the rail company shows we’re addicted to spin,
Consider what might have been the alternative to Ed Burkhardt, head of the Maine, Montreal and Atlantic Railway, whose Lac-Mégantic press conference last week was almost universally criticized.
A hired spokeswoman — a female offers greatest empathetic value whenever loss of life is involved — walks to the microphone in a local school auditorium (not the one where displaced victims of the wreck are living). She’s middleaged, to best express seriousness, and attractive, in a Glenn Close kind of way, to encourage sympathy in her audience. She stands before a printed backdrop bearing the town crest of Lac-Mégantic. It’s blue with white lettering, to express trust and hopefulness, and nicely offsets her sober, dark suit, which is so expensively tailored it conceals how expensive it is, a concession to modesty required by the low incomes of most of the disaster’s victims. She delivers her opening statement first in French and then in English.
“No words can express the sorrow my company, its workers and executives feel at the disaster that has befallen the people of Lac Mégantic because of the accident involving our train. (Note that the although “involvement” is conceded, “responsibility” is not.) Our hearts go out to those who have lost friends and loved ones. We will do everything we can to assist local and provincial authorities in the recovery operation. To that end, we are immediately pledging $10 million toward a Lac-Mégantic redevelopment fund, and as the recovery proceeds we will consider further injections to that fund as the need becomes apparent. As for the causes of the accident, our company’s standard operating procedure is to comply fully with all government safety regulations and in many cases to exceed them. I know you all have questions about the specific circumstances of this tragic accident but I hope you will understand that, because of ongoing investigations by the provincial police and the Transportation Safety Board, I simply can’t comment on any specifics about what may or may not have led to this tragic accident that has so shocked and saddened everyone in our corporate family.”
She delivers the statement, particularly its opening sentences, with due solemnity and frequent pauses suggesting depth of emotion. The spokeswoman then “takes” questions but of course doesn’t actually answer them. Instead, she works variations on the theme of her statement, keeping resolutely on message: The company is sorrowful, is fully involved in the recovery and will help in redevelopment, but, most importantly, is unable to say anything about responsibility until the investigators have completed their work.
That’s the kind of media relations we’ve all grown accustomed to. The successful corporate or political spokesman establishes a simple, clear message utterly lacking in detail. And then makes every answer to every question as uninformative as possible a restatement of the basic position. The trick, and only the highest-paid communications specialists can do it well, is to seem responsive to questions without actually going beyond the statement, to give every appearance in tone and body language of being understanding of and sympathetic toward the questioner but to concede nothing. Anyone with a talent for this form of uncommunication can go very far in our society.
Compare all this with poor Burkhardt, who clearly has no skill for the kind of message management we’ve all become accustomed to. He was obviously appalled by the press’s customary rudeness, as any normal person would be, and said as much. But, unlike successful corporate and political communicators, once he’d established some order in the proceedings, he answered every question he was asked directly and in considerable and, his lawyers probably told him, ill-advised detail.
He didn’t tear up or break down. It would have been better for him if he had, especially if, like Bill Clinton, say, he could have pulled it off without appearing to try to. But tearing up and breaking down clearly aren’t part of his personality. He did apologize, unreservedly, several times. But then when a reporter asked him to apologize yet again, he made the rookie mistake of noting he’d already apologized 10 times before in fact apologizing again. A communications consultant would have advised him to simply keep apologizing without commenting on the number of times he had done so.
When asked, irrelevantly, what his net worth was he said, irreverently, “A lot less now than it was before Saturday,” which was honest and immediate and indicated he personally had skin in the game, as they say. But to some viewers this put his financial loss on a par with all the deaths. A communications consultant would have had him dodge the question.
Most tellingly, when Burkhardt was asked what caused the tragedy he actually had an answer: his engineer very likely had not set enough hand brakes, an assertion that visibly startled several members of the press, accustomed as they are to, “I’m afraid I can’t comment while the investigations are ongoing.”
So, what do we prefer in this type of situation? Unresponsive but “correct” corporate smoothness or genuine answers, however crustily delivered? The response to Burkhardt’s press conference suggests we’ve actually come to prefer no-answer answers.
In 2005, Princeton philosophy Harry Frankfurt published a little book that in its 69 pages says more true things about our age than almost anything written before or since. Because this is a family newspaper I have to fill out its title, “On Bulls**t”, with asterisks. But it’s an essay everyone should read. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much (BS),” it begins. Frankfurt’s thesis is not that BS “is false but that it is phoney.” The problem with Burkhardt evidently was that he did not sufficiently give voice to what is now the expected phoniness.
It seems we’ve been fed such a steady diet of BS for so many years we now actually kind of like the taste.