Steve
Paikin had an
excellent post recently asking whether it was too much to ask for a direct
answer to a direct question? His main point was how several leaders in Canada
had developed the habit of not dealing with simple straight forward questions
and instead were embarking on long, meandering non-responses often prompting
journalists to ask the same question again.
This meandering approach to answering simple questions with relatively simple answers – he provides
some examples in his post – risks eroding a lot of the capital our politicians
have built up during the recent crisis. As he concludes: “these leaders are inviting a flattening of their popularity curves if
they continue to obfuscate, rather than doing what the public has richly
rewarded them for doing in the past: just answering a straight question with a
straight answer.”
My original
thoughts on this issue posted in a comment were that “I agree Steve but am not surprised. It remains that politics is
dominated by communications staffers rather than people who can « do things ».
It’s only during a crisis that expertise and ability become important,
otherwise it’s simply about the message and old habits die hard.” Indeed,
the constant desire of politicians and their staffers to manage situations and
message has led to an odd twist on a societal level borrowing a bit from the Marshall
McLuhan phrase: "The medium is the message" - its only the medium, there is no message. In our politics and work lives, what matters is not the content at all
but how it is communicated with more emphasis on how things are said than what
is said. In the hands of skilled
practitioners of this art, you can have both the content and very skilled messaging. In lesser hands, well …. you get long
meandering responses with many turns of phrase and empathic expressions designed
to sound clever or comforting but which really say absolutely nothing and may mean
the responder is hiding something ranging anywhere from a hidden agenda to
their ignorance and lack of ability.
In the
best-case scenario, you can get nothing but words and platitudes from leaders but life goes on
because the issue does not matter and you can tune out. During times of a full belly, you can indulge
nattering politicians and bureaucrats who like to hear their own voices and promote
agendas based on the aspirations and the lobbying activities of their friends and
connections. In times of crisis, this is
a problem and may lead to opportunities for plain speaking leaders who can get
things done but once the crisis is over, they are often dumped – think of
Winston Churchill at the end of the Second World War. However, the worst-case scenario occurs – and
believe me there is always a worst-case scenario – when the focus on communication
and the message becomes a means of stifling debate and dissent and can become a
fundamentally undemocratic force that prevents new ideas from coming to the
fore.
My best
example of this is a meeting many years ago when after making several points in
plain and direct language, I was told that I was making everyone uncomfortable.
Foolish me, rather than simply saying “Sorry,” I instead directly asked why
everyone was uncomfortable? After all, I
was presenting evidence on the matter under discussion in careful and measured language. After a pause, I was told that it was not what I said but how I said it. Apparently,
a polite laying out of a list of facts that contradicts the direction based on
wishful thinking that everyone else wanted to go made everyone
uncomfortable. This was not about how I
said it, it was indeed what I said and in the absence of being able to muster
empirical evidence or facts against the position I had taken, the response was
designed to shut off discussion by making it about how the message was
communicated.
The
long-term response has been a corrosive effect on our society and institutions
that has indeed paved the way for populism.
The railing against the lack of evidence and mindlessness of populist
policy is being led by the same masters of obfuscation who got us here in the
first place. They are at their wits end because their communication is not having
an effect against another communication.
After all, if it is how you say something rather than the logic or
evidence underpinning it that matters, then what does it matter what the facts
are? If reason and evidence are just
window dressing to hang a message on, then how can one combat fake news or
simple policies not based on evidence? If
all the focus is simply on optics, spin, communications and messaging, then what
you are telling everyone is that facts and evidence do not matter. If its all about appearance and presentation, then is it any surprise the world is in the state
it is in?
