United, Spicer fiascos expose apology crisis
Iapologize
in advance for what you are going to read in this column. It’s a mistake. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.
That, my friends, is how you should make an apology.
Botch a mea culpa badly enough and it’s likely to bounce around the internet — with, perhaps, a meme — until some other poor goofus bails you out by saying something even dumber.
Take Oscar Munoz as an example of saying the wrong thing.
Munoz, the chief executive of United Continental Holdings, was thrust into the spotlight after the crew on one of his planes thought the best way to remove a passenger who didn’t want to get bumped was to have the cops drag him, bloodied, down the aisle and off the jet.
“No one should ever be mistreated this way,” Munoz said, unknowingly implying that there were accepted ways to mistreat passengers.
His statement of regret was one of at least five highprofile apologies in the last week or so. And in their own special way, each of the five botched the apology.
That got me believing that the US needs a new, independent agency to regulate and arbitrate apologies. There should be a bare minimum effort put forth by folks who mess up.
For Munoz, it was a wrong word — after a day earlier spewing an overcooked stew of corporate speak.
He said his crew was forced to “re-accommodate” the passenger. Ouch.
Fortunately for Munoz, one of the millions of people who saw the crazy video of the re-accomodated passenger was President Trump. His spokesman, Sean
Spicer, said he thought the video was “troubling” — moments before he nearly made the world forget about
United Airlines by saying Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad was worse than Adolf Hitler because even Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons. Ouch.
Spicer should have simply said “I apologize for what I said. It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I won’t say anything like that again.”
But Spicer decided, instead, that it would be fun to wiggle around in the quicksand, saying at first, “I was obviously trying to make a point about the heinous acts that Assad had made against his own people last week, using chemical weapons and gas.”
He then apologized. I’d say his was better than the United Airlines guy — but it still took way too long for Spicer to get it right.
The same internet that so painfully distributes people’s mistakes around the world also has recommendations for atoning for those mistakes.
“Every apology needs to start with the magic words ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I apologize,’ ” one expert on groveling pointed out.
While Spicer and Munoz both eventually did the deed, they waited too long.
The second step, the expert said, is “admitting responsibility.” Third, make amends. And fourth, promise it will never happen again.
Jeffrey Lacker, who resigned this month as head of the Federal Reserve’s Richmond, Va., bank, took a long time to say he was sorry for tipping off a Wall Street analyst about important monetary policy — like three years.
Lacker was bashed by the financial press — but mainly because he also admitted to not confessing to his mistake when he was first questioned years ago.
“I deeply regret the role I may have played in confirming this confidential informa- tion and in its dissemination,” Lacker said in a lengthy and learned public statement.
But by using the words “may have played,” Lacker was wiggling around the apology like a belly dancer with hemorrhoids. (Sorry, I shouldn’t have offended belly dancers. I won’t do it again.)
Apologies are always harder when sex may have been involved because you have to wait for people to stop giggling before they y hear the “sorry” part. Robert Bentley, who just resigned as governor of Alabama, was succinct. “I made a mistake. Two years ago I made a mistake.”
Bentley got caught having what the papers described as “inappropriate relations” with a staffer, news of which came out only after his wife filed for divorce.
How well did Bentley apologize? So-so. The former love gov said he was resigning so his family would not longer be put through the wringer — saying nothing of his guilty plea in impeachment proceedings. PepsiCo, headed by Indra Nooyi, was also forced to apologize after its TV spot — featuring Kendall Jenner leaving a photo shoot to hand a Pepsi to a cop, thus quelling protestorcop tensions — got roundly rripped. “Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize,” the company said — although it sounded much more like they were sorry people were offended. A Pepsi in-house creative team produced the ad. They were probably also sorry they couldn’t blame an agency.