3rd December 2021
One of the joys of dealing with press officers is their insincerity.
They know they are being insincere and evasive, and you know they are being insincere and evasive.
But they are in their role, and you are in yours.
One of the increasing common formulations adopted by press officers is “We do not recognise [x]”.
The phrase is not a denial: it is not being stated that [x] is false.
Nor is it, of course, an admission.
It is something in between.
In this way the phrase is like “We do not admit” used by civil litigators – though in litigation you should only use that phase if the fact is actually outside of your knowledge, even if you do not accept it to be true.
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“We do not recognise [x]”.
So an alleged thing may be true and unwelcome – but a spokesperson has managed to find something about the thing alleged which means they can avoid admitting it without denying it.
https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1466708215983398913
As a lawyer, I would just then want to ask “well, what do you recognise to be the case?”
Though so deft are press officers at their insincerity and evasion that this clever follow-up will also no doubt be dodged.
And so we have this phrase – joining the likes of “we do not want to get into speculation” and “we do not give a running commentary” – as a means by which government press officers pretend to you (and perhaps to themselves) that there a good reason for not providing the information or confirmation requested.
The shame of it is that government press officers are (or should be) public servants.
The provision of information to the press and the public, in the public interest, is what they are actually being paid to do (and for which many will get civil service pensions and even gongs).
Yet they seem to to take pride in not serving the public interest but the political interests of current ministers.
This uncomfortable truth should be stark and glaring to those who work in government press offices.
But they do not see it.
Perhaps they do not recognise it.
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A similar line was adopted by Government spokespeople, including the then foreign secretary, quite early on in the pandemic: “We do not accept that…”
It is all part and parcel of the debasement and erosion of public trust in our polity. What once were civil servants employed to provide accurate information to the press (and others) are now the worst type of “public relations” advisors to Ministers, deployed to provide cover, dissimulation and bare faced lies, rather than be a conduit of reliable information for their departments. And I say this as one who, in a former life, was a corporate communications consultant to blue chip companies. As a consultancy we had a few rules: we would never take on a client whose product or service we were not wholly comfortable representing and we would never tell a lie – in the corporate world and especially in a crisis communications situation, a lie will always come back to bite you. Your credibility is everything. Government “press officers” have no such qualms and are widely disbelieved and discredited. One wonders who they think is taken in?
I often wonder why journalists don’t, or can’t, ask extremely short, tight, restrictive questions the answer to which can basically be only ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
With the current matter, it could be simply “Was there a party?”
If the reply were to be “I don’t recognise there was a party,” the spokesperson would look pretty stupid. The journalist might then ask “Were you there?”
This is not quite the same as Paxman’s “Did you overrule him?”, as the meaning of overrule could be picked on. Simple Past tense forms of the verb ‘to be’ are the most useful and the fewer adjectives the better.
In April and May last year at No.10 press conferences, I noticed, and got quite exercised about, the seemingly universal tendency for journalists to ask very long questions, with many ultimately irrelevant details which could be ‘recognised’ or not, and often on two different matters, giving the interviewee/politician/spokesperson a huge range of options to avoid giving a satisfactory answer. I think many people found it all very frustrating and ultimately very unhelpful.
Well said
I recall a clip of then-Senator Kamala Harris asking then-AG Bill Barr about whether he was given instructions or suggestions by the White House (I don’t recall exact the wording but it was something close to that), and he responded by pausing and thinking for about 30 seconds, plainly trying to come up with a definition for her question that would let him answer no. So Senator Harris tossed out a few synonyms to try and get him to respond and eventually he said something like “no I don’t think so”.
So my point is that if they twist the meaning of your words enough it doesn’t matter what you ask, they’ll give whatever answer they want.
More to the main post, if I was a reporter, I’d say something along the lines of the government spokesperson provided a comment which “did not address the issue”. That way the reader can tell that the government’s response was to try and obscure the issue, without forcing the reader to try and make head or tail of it themselves.
I’d go further than “did not address” and say that the best way to report it would be “the spokesman refused to deny”. So, with regard to a party, this would be the headline when a spokesman said that no rules were broken or something similarly evasive. An article can then go into more detail, stating exactly what the spokesman said.
Alas, concepts such as:
public service,
intergrity,
honesty,
responsibility/accountability,
and even decency are all alien to the current administration. It seems fairly clear that they know the only “being held to account” that they might face is losing their seat at the next election. This is a minor matter compared to the full force of the law that would surely fall upon them were these stunts pulled in any other working sphere. The servants of the administration are simply following the lead (and undoubtedly instructions) of their political masters safe in the knowledge that the bosses immunity will almost certainly cloak them.
It is a similar tale within areas of the justice system. Police and others, such as Ombudsmen, articulate in conclusions “We have seen no evidence” which is another phrase which makes a useful excuse not to do anything regarding complaints of criminal activity or complaints against government departments or indeed the large number of NHS errors which ultimately end up with major investigations such as Windrush, Mid Staffs, Shrewsbury and Telford maternity services to name just a few. Another favourite is “We will respond “In due course”. We are taken for fools David but it is the fools who actually spout this nonsense. Worse still they believe we are fooled
A similar evasiveness is exhibited by such expressions as “I did nothing wrong” and ” no rules were broken”. These invite the Joe Friday response – “Just the facts ma’am”.
We’ll make the judgments.
And i thought after reading this you where talking about the
” false narrative” response from the UK to the USA, who seem to have said no lifting of steel and aluminum tarrifs for the UK, as long as HMG is playing around with the NI protocol.
And stupid question, what does getting the gongs mean???
Not stupid at all, if you’ve not heard it before.
“Gongs” is British slang for medals and awards – grades in the Order of the British Empire, for example. It apparently comes from Army slang, from the resemblance of the consequent hanging metallic discs to the similar musical instrument. The OED says the word is Malay in origin.
Often used in tabloid headlines for a certain jolly brevity, like “bonk” or “romp”.
In similar vein, we are told that the new measures against COVID are “balanced and proportionate.” What does this mean? Absolutely nothing in my view.
And how is mask wearing mandate (shops and public transport, but not hospitality venues) justifiable against these criteria?
Me, I don’t recognise the UK any longer.
In both senses.
Orwell told us that political language – ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. Edward Bernays – The Father of Spin made a packet bringing the old techniques up to date for business and for politics. Way back Cicero delighted in throwing sand in the judge’s eyes.
The question is why be so secretive and misleading. The reason surely is that 98% of everything is c$%p, the much promoted project or initiative or promised innovation will either never come to fruition or make a profit or produce the vaunted results. This fact has to be concealed from the naive.
We have been seeing this kind of weaselling for the last 20 years or more. The UK government needs to cover up the fact that smart motorways are not safe, that electric cars will prove a failure in the mass market, that green energy will prove unsustainably expensive. Slowly we are running out of money and trade capacity. This will have big implications, slowly at first but accelerating. Do not expect the NHS to recover to its former glories, the cut down form will become the norm. Cracks in society will appear and will need to be lied about. Slowly slowly the narrative will change and you won’t like it.
Then we will face huge social problems as we divide into some sort of social caste system. Those who get into private school and a Big 4 job will stay that way forever and their children and children’s children forever amen. They joined the caste. Other caste options are available but few so good as the Westminster caste. The optimism and assortative mating of 50 years ago have disappeared, but don’t tell anyone.
BTW, if you ask unkind questions you will get frozen out and that will hit you in the wallet.
If I have mentioned this here before, apologies but it needs restating to show how in half a century notions of honesty, transparency and openness have been stripped out of our public life. In the 1960’s as a very junior press office it was laid down that politicians did political answers, we served up facts. And if we answered a journalist’s question we needed to be able to show exactly where the facts came from. “No comment” was not an option.
Of course we were there to present government in a good light, but it was always on the basis of facts: most of my time was spent sharing “good news” stories of which there were many.
Of course there were times when the dividing line between political statements and our work were difficult to agree, but such a decision was made with great care and professionalism.
Now we have institutionalised obfuscation (lies?)
Your post also applies to the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police who doesn’t seem to recognise that events in the past are by definition matters that should be investigated.
Many years ago (40 since you ask) I was a Press Officer for a central Government Department. We regularly had to get guidance from our colleagues involved in policy work. This took the form of a ‘line to take’. And although I like to think I always behaved with integrity I was a junior official and am sure that sometimes we were obstructive. In fact, I recall my immediate boss giving me guidance, more than once, that I should provide an enquirer with ‘every possible assistance short of help’.
I think things have grown worse but it has always been a default position that central Government should not need to answer awkward or difficult questions. I think that it is just more overt now.
Richard Thomson’s comment above is spot on about the failure of questioners. But to be fair to the questioners they were restricted to one question so tended to try to sneak in a supplementary and spend too long speaking. Thus they were denied the opportunity to use the technique of a good barrister – asking a series of short questions designed to ultimately elicit a particular answer.
The onus is on journalists to find a way of tackling the deliberate obfuscation which is now commonplace.