Comment: Whose line is it anyway?

Thursday 20 June 2019

"Few things feel less convincing of a Chief Minister who is in charge, than one who feels the need to tell you that this is the case, in a letter that bears so many of the hallmarks of his Communications Director that it overshadows the original discussion."

That's the view of columnist Katherine Penhaligon, who each month picks the best business buzzword examples to try and reveal what lies beneath.

This time around she discusses good PR and how what people really want is something that comes from the heart, not just pretty sentences carefully crafted by a PR person...

"At the heart of PR is a trap laid for those who undertake it. The skill of good PR is in not knowing that the PR person is there at all: not to hear them, or feel their presence in any way.

The words that come out of the ‘PR’d’ person’s mouth should sound like them but better. Think the Berocca advert: you, on a good day.

That’s what it should be. The trap, of course, is that sometimes one of two things happen. The ego of the PR gets in the way, or they simply get carried away because they know (or think they know) what the real answers should be, regardless of whose mouth they are coming out of. 

They knew where the emphasis was supposed to be, and the words that they chose so carefully weren’t just the result of an afternoon’s fun with a Thesuraus, but rather a delight in words, and a thorough grasp of the nuances of language.

Pictured: "The words that they chose so carefully weren’t just the result of an afternoon’s fun with a Thesuraus."

The end result, though, is that it jars with the known character or public persona of the individual speaking the words, and the PR person and their frustrations start making a bid for the surface – like the ET (not that one) that caused John Hurt some minor discomfort in Alien.

Sometimes they forget that it is not their own view that they are supposed to be articulating in the most elegant terms.

It’s true that the game was up quite some time ago when public relations became more, well, public. Quiet and unassuming characters like Alastair Campbell may have played a part in PR becoming the story rather than telling it. 

You could argue that in the world of government communications, for instance, there is a kind of transparency at play, if it is blindingly obvious to everyone that there is an indignant comms bod bobbing about in the background, exercising his or her sense of righteous outrage through a dutifully compliant Minister. And that apparent compliance is the nub of the matter, isn’t it?

Pictured: "The skill of good PR is in not knowing that the PR person is there at all."

There has to be a recognition that busy people need work done for them, and while we do want experts providing our top politicians with the information they need to do their job well, we also want to know that the people that we elected have the force of character to assert the principles and moral standpoint that earned them the X on the voting slip in the first place.

Too much of the voice – and potentially view – of the wordsmith and any remaining trust in the convictions of the Minister in question seeps even further between the cracks, especially if the public have little or no grounds to trust the person in the background who appears to be pulling the strings.

And, to take a recent and local case in point, few things feel less convincing of a Chief Minister who is in charge, than one who feels the need to tell you that this is the case, in a letter that bears so many of the hallmarks of his Communications Director that it overshadows the original discussion.

It is never easy to keep composed under attack, and even harder to stay silent, especially if there is a desire to set the record straight, under near constant criticism.

Pictured: "Few things feel less convincing of a Chief Minister who is in charge, than one who feels the need to tell you that this is the case."

It is not that reacting in itself is the wrong thing to do, but more that there seems to be no reading of what the mood of the Jersey public is, or understanding that there is a underlying lack of trust in the best of crop currently advising Ministers.

Against that backdrop, something so obviously composed by someone else would seem, arguably, fairly poor PR. 

Some of that criticism will be deserved, some not so much; but either way that is how the job works and most of voting people would just like to be certain that what they are hearing is from the heart, and not just the pen of someone who knows a nicely formed sentence when they see one." 

This column first appeared in Connect. Read the June edition by clicking here.