HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS

Four basic principles communicators should follow in any health emergency

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop  

Listen to podcast version here

At the time of the historic Three Mile Island nuclear accident, I was a young news editor at New York’s WOR, which was then one of the most influential radio stations in the country. I was responsible for thirteen newscasts each day, along with news headlines, sports headlines, and assigning our reporters to stories in the field.

One day when I was arriving to work the afternoon shift, the desk assistant told me a medical doctor was on the phone, and wanted to speak with an editor. The doctor introduced himself and then stunned me with a simple question.

“Do you realize,” he said, “that your newscaster just gave out a lethal prescription on the air?”

Lethal, I wondered? I knew we had reported on fears of a Three Mile Island style accident at the Indian Point nuclear plant just north of the city. A local lawmaker had been calling on schools to take the precaution of stocking potassium iodide pills, which block the thyroid’s absorption of radioactivity, so that they could be distributed to students in an emergency.

I went back and checked the news anchor’s script from the shift before mine began. He had accidentally written that the schoolchildren should be given, not potassium iodide, but potassium cyanide. The previous editor had missed it. Hundreds of thousands of people had heard it. Obviously, we issued a correction.

Of course, no school followed that advice, and there was no accident at Indian Point. But it impressed on me the overarching importance of disseminating accurate information, especially when it comes to public health, and really taking the time to proofread and vet it before pushing it out.

Three Mile Island is history, of course. We live in the fake news era, where media is entertainment, basic information seems pliable, and forces are at work across the political spectrum to take facts and twist them to fit this or that agenda.

But in a health crisis there is no room for politics, games or misstatements. Whether you’re communicating urgent information to the news media, your stockholders, or your own employees in a crisis, accurate, verifiable facts are paramount.

But facts inherently need context to be understood. Context is what we brought to our work with the Centers for Disease Control a few years back, and it’s what we desperately need to communicate with the right balance in the coronavirus epidemic.

So accuracy is job one. But it’s just a start. What follows here is only a sliver of we cover in our communications trainings on a public health situation, but these three additional guideposts are musts:

Clarity. Avoid health care jargon that may be understood by you, but not by others. Keep your words simple. I like to suggest the “Uncle Ralph Test.” If your Uncle Ralph will understand your phrasing, go with it. If he won’t, don’t. Whenever possible, use first or second person pronouns to keep your tone conversational and approachable.

Precision. Use simple words, yes, but choose them carefully. Keep in mind that your audience in a crisis is listening with heightened anxiety. Strive for language that doesn’t lend itself to misinterpretation, especially by people who might only be half listening or distracted. And learn strategies for answering questions that incorporate that same principle of precision.

Empathy. The coronavirus does not infect rocks or trees. It attacks human beings, with real lives, loved ones and livelihoods. Remember that every health crisis is at its core a human crisis. Speak with compassion for those suffering, and genuine understanding of the emotions in play. And even if your message is inherently alarming, and your options limited, people still want to know what they can do. Whatever simple, actionable advice you can offer, move it high up on your narrative.

As of this writing, it appears that outbreaks of what the scientists call COVID-19 will be part of our global landscape for some time. Which brings me around to a fifth suggestion for communicators. Stay informed. With each wave of infection, the scientists on the front lines of halting this epidemic are learning something to apply to the next. I don’t agree with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche about very much, but one of his aphorisms makes good sense to this day. “That which does not kill us,” he said, “makes us stronger.”

To learn more about our services addressing this urgent need, click here.

Listen to the podcast of this Press Center Commentary here.

CLICKBAIT FOR A CAUSE

The social media sharing of a Sunday morning talk show segment demonstrates how a lowbrow headline can serve a higher purpose

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop  

Listen to podcast version here

Journalism is perennially caught between two competing instincts: medicine and sugar. Tell the people what they need to know… or give the people what they want to know. “What tells” versus “what sells.” As reporters, our better angels usually favor the former. Our editors and publishers often lean into the latter.

A prominent cable news program recently blended medicine with sugar in a way uniquely suited to the digital age. And it’s a fair wager that not even CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley realized it was happening.

Pelley has been on tour recently to promote his new book, “Truth Worth Telling,” which is reviewed in the Library section of our Press Center. He was interviewed by Brian Stelter on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Pelley came prepared with strong medicine - directly related to the core theme of his book: media and truth.

“The American people,” said Pelley, “have to have reliable information to make reliable decisions about our country.” And as to how to get reliable information in the fake news era, he offered a very practical suggestion:

“If you see something on the Internet that you wonder about or that outrages you, then do what has never been possible before. Look at a variety of other sources. Spend 10 minutes figuring out whether that story is true. I wonder what CNN is saying about that. I wonder what the Chicago Tribune is saying about that. And triangulate your information…our viewers have never had to do that in history. And today it’s going to be mandatory. “

Mandatory - as in, “take your medicine.” But see what happens next. Before he wraps up, Stelter asks a question about the recent shakeup at CBS News, and Pelley takes the interview in a very different direction.

“We’ve been through a dark period in the last several years of incompetent management and sort of a hostile work environment within the news division,” Pelley said. “I lost my job at the Evening News because I wouldn’t stop complaining to management about the hostile work environment.”

Pelley went on to laud the recent positive changes at CBS. But the die had been cast. You could even argue that Scott Pelley just stepped on his own key message. So what now?

CNN posted the entire Pelley interview to its own site, and to Twitter, under the following headline: “Scott Pelley’s Biggest Worry about Media and Democracy.” In the ensuing month, it gathered 276 retweets and 744 likes. Not bad, but not overwhelming. Like all the Sunday morning talk shows, Reliable Sources has a relatively small but well educated audience - probably the kind of consumers who already take Pelley’s advice to keep your sources of news broad and diverse.

But when CNN posted the Pelley interview to YouTube, an online powerhouse second only to Facebook in the number of users worldwide, it gave the very same six minute segment a vastly different headline: “Scott Pelley: Why I lost My Evening News Job.”

Within a month, the YouTube posting garnered more than 544-thousand views. A huge accomplishment for a lecture about media literacy.

Did the “Why I Lost My Evening News Job” headline amount to clickbait? A crass attention getter? In this case, I’d call it smart marketing: clickbait for a cause.

Scott Pelley’s warnings about media and democracy were, admittedly, a bit of a sermon… but on Reliable Sources, he was preaching mainly to the converted. With a provocative tabloid headline, CNN packaged a message it believes the entire world needs to hear - in a way that played to what people want to hear. And because Stelter asked the evening news question last, it didn’t deliver until the very end. The audience had to sit through the sermon to get to the dessert.

No less a media figure than the legendary 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt liked to say, before they’ll watch, you gotta get them into the tent. There’s a lesson here for communicators of all stripes who want to reach people beyond those who are already on board with them in our divided age.

Even Mary Poppins would agree… just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Listen to the podcast of this Press Center Commentary here.

THE CAMERA NEVER BLINKS

An analysis of R. Kelly’s media meltdown, and becoming your own worst public enemy

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop  

Listen to podcast version here

R&B singer R. Kelly being interviewed by Gayle King. Image courtesy CBS News.

When I’m asked to prepare a public figure for a high-stakes media interview, we typically schedule a conference call with some members of their team.  We go over the subject matter, the goals for the training, and the time and equipment needs.  And if it’s someone I’ve never worked with before, I always ask this two-part question:

Are they coming into the training willingly?  Or are they being dragged into the process kicking and screaming? 

It’s a critical question.  If you’re not inclined to listen to sound advice, if you have a proclivity for self-sabotage - or both - the last place you want to be is in front of a network television camera.  

Which brings us around to the strange case of R. Kelly, played out in all its oddity on a virtual national stage.  Kelly, an R&B singer dogged by sex allegations for years, sat down with CBS News correspondent Gayle King to defend himself following his indictment on 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse.  

I doubt that anyone helped R. Kelly prepare for the fateful interview.  Gayle King herself expressed surprise that Kelly had even agreed to appear.  So she asked him why.   

“I’m very tired of all the lies,” Kelly said - thinking, perhaps, that this blanket statement would somehow settle the matter.  It didn’t, of course, because King asked the natural follow up question.   

“What are the lies you are hearing that disturb you most?”

Kelly, fresh out of a stint in jail, proceeded, in a media sense, to lock himself behind bars all over again.  In a litany of self hurt, he repeated the long list of the charges against him. 

“Got little girls trapped in the basement… handcuffing people, starving people… I have a harem…”

Kelly was attempting to dismiss these allegations as fantasy.  But he broke a fundamental rule about handling negative questions.  He repeated all the negatives – thereby succeeding only in reinforcing them in the listener’s mind.  He even offered up a new line of attack to his adversaries that no one had yet thought of. 

“They was describing Lucifer,” Kelly said, referring to his accusers.  “I’m not Lucifer.” 

Since Kelly’s answers were long on denials but short on evidence, Gayle King did what most reporters do on instinct: she pressed for specifics.  Unprepared to offer positive, exculpatory evidence, Kelly eventually recognized he was in a mess of his own making.  He finally exploded in rage - in a clip that has since gone viral.

Emotion on television is supposed to evoke what pioneering CBS News producer Fred Friendly once called “the little picture.”  There is a reason why photographers go for the closeup in spontaneous, genuine moments of tears, joy, or even controlled anger.  Those aspects of the human persona evoke a mirror-like human reaction in us all.  They draw us in.  

Rage, on the other hand, has the opposite effect.  It pushes us away.  We may stare in disbelief for a moment, as if we were slowing down to gawk at a bad car crash.  But soon, if the scene is too painful or too bloody, we speed up and drive off.  Our principal response is fight or flight. 

Kelly could have avoided making this bad situation worse by being ready to rebut his accusers, point for point - and focusing on whatever positive themes were relevant, instead of unspecific denials of the negatives.  But if clearing his name was the primary objective in this interview, Kelly failed miserably.  The real winner in this faceoff was Gayle King.  She displayed coolness, professionalism and focus in the face of her subject’s embarrassingly public media meltdown.

A CBS correspondent and anchor from another era - Dan Rather - once authored a book entitled, “The Camera Never Blinks.”   If you’re on TV often enough and long enough, Rather observed, there is no hiding.  You will eventually come across for who you are. 

From a legal standpoint, the court system will inevitably determine the guilt or innocence of R. Kelly.  But the court of public opinion may already be delivering the ultimate verdict of who he is.  Given how many eyeballs slowed down to gawk at this media car crash, all the kicking and screaming didn’t help.

Listen to the podcast of this Press Center Commentary here.    

YOU ARE NOT THE STORY

As fed up as many reporters might be with President Trump, they do the public and their fellow journalists a disservice when they steal the spotlight at a press conference

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop 

(Listen to podcast version here) 

“Walk and talk!  Walk and talk!  That’s all you kids know how to do!”

I was in my 20’s, a radio news editor turned TV reporter, in the office of a New York news director who was looking to hire me.  He was watching a standup where my producer had urged me to walk about 10 paces from location A to location B, pause, point at B, then look earnestly back at the camera and ask a question of the audience.

Steve Dunlop reporting from Central Park in 1984, about a year after he was told to give up the walking talking standup.

The walk and talk thing did strike me as a bit theatrical.  But hey, I thought.  I’m not in radio anymore.  This is television. 

The news director ejected my videotape from the screening machine and looked me in the eye. 

“Dunlop, always remember,” he said.  “YOU are NOT the story.” 

It was a lesson I never forgot, but apparently a few members of today’s White House press corps never learned it at all. 

At bottom, “you are not the story” is the rule that CNN’s Jim Acosta has been violating at White House press conferences. Asking tough questions is his job.  Dominating the floor is not.  Wrestling a White House intern for control of a wireless microphone crossed a line.  Interrupting another reporter in the middle of a question crossed another line.  So did interrupting the president.  The White House Press Office was right to suspend his credentials. 

Television is a medium that thrives on drama, and we all crave a dollop of electronic confrontation.  People of a certain age will remember ABC’s Sam Donaldson shouting questions to President Ronald Reagan over the din of a helicopter on the South Lawn.  Reagan would smile, wave, and motion that he could not hear.

Then there was Dan Rather’s Watergate-era TV exchange with President Richard Nixon, who, when the CBS correspondent was greeted with applause from a supportive audience, asked him, “Are you running for something?”

“No, sir, Mr. President,” Rather replied. “Are you?”

But those exchanges were as civilized as high tea at the Savoy, compared to Acosta’s actions in the East Room.  

President Trump deserves his share of the blame for goading the media with his “CNN is fake news” mantra and all that’s surrounded it.  But his dismissive tactics are not unprecedented.  In fact, they are reminiscent of the more freewheeling press conferences I covered in New York’s City Hall when Ed Koch was mayor in the 1980’s.

Former New York mayor Ed Koch handling the media, as only he could, in the 1980’s. From an article in New York Magazine.

We would routinely ask pointed questions that Koch called out of bounds.  If we were fortunate, we might get one follow up question.  But then another reporter had another question, so Koch would move on.  We all got that.  After all, you’re not the only journalist in the room. 

But today’s wireless hand-held mics have changed that dynamic.  Similar devices of 30 years ago had too limited a range and were subject to too much interference, so they were useless to capture reporters’ questions at a press conference.  We simply had to wait to be acknowledged - and then speak loudly enough for everyone to hear. 

But just as the iPhone changed the way we communicate, the wireless mic has changed the press briefing.  It has become a holy grail of control – in this case, between Donald Trump and Jim Acosta.  (Or, to be more precise, between Acosta and the intern transporting the mic around the room.)   

Recall the objective of a White House press conference.  It is to ask the president tough questions and hear candid answers.  The story is Donald Trump.  The story is not Jim Acosta. 

CNN called the lifting of Acosta’s White House credentials “unprecedented” and a “threat to our democracy.”  But the network does the journalistic community a disservice when it positions reportorial grandstanding as defending the people’s right to know.  There were some 50 other journalists in the East Room, many with hands raised, waiting patiently and politely to be recognized.  Presumably they all have brains. 

And presumably they all recognize - as combative and hostile as Washington politics has become - that they serve the public the best when they are not the story.

SILENCE ISN'T GOLDEN

In the current toxic communications environment, staying quiet isn’t the answer.  Telling your organization’s stories - clearly, passionately, and in large numbers – is. 

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop  

 Listen to podcast version here

_____________________________

I walked into the training not knowing quite what to expect.  My subject was a senior executive at a major European firm.   Be careful, I was warned.  He had chewed up a long list of media trainers, and by all accounts he thought the process itself was utter nonsense.  He would be a notoriously tough nut to crack. 

The door opened.  I was greeted by the sort of warm smile you get from a long lost friend. 

“Steve!” he exclaimed.  “It’s good to see you again!”

I didn’t understand, at first.  Good to see me again?  Was I one of those chewed-up trainers?  What exactly was good about this?

“I really resisted doing another training,” he admitted to me.  “But when I heard I could work with you… I remembered that you were the only one who had actually helped me.” 

It turned out I had, in fact, trained this individual long ago - at another company.  He rose through the ranks and eventually left for a new job a continent away.  The new firm required him to work with their “Brand X” trainer, whose approach, he told me, yes, he did view as nonsense.  (He actually used a stronger term than nonsense.)

He had misplaced my contact info, but kept his handwritten notes from my lecture all these years.  And he had made a special trip back to his home office just to retrieve them.  He was sorry we’d lost touch.  He couldn’t wait to get back to work.

Messaging made obsolete by a single tweet

I don’t tell this story to pat myself on the back.  I share it because lately, with a handful of exceptions, this kind of enthusiasm for communicating has become an increasingly rare commodity in the business world.  And in an age when so much corporate messaging work can be made obsolete by a single tweet, that’s understandable.  

After all, messaging in a large organization doesn’t materialize overnight.  It requires thought.  It demands research.  It needs rewrites and input from far flung divisions.  Reversing the process is like turning around an ocean liner.  Can be done, but it takes time.  The larger the ocean liner, the longer it takes.

But while your rudder and engines are straining to execute that turn, all your audience hears is silence.  

“Fear can be powerful, but your words can, too. To fall silent is to lose your seat at the table. ”

That silence is driven not just by your need to regroup.  If we’re honest with ourselves, it’s also propelled by fear - a dark resignation that these days, your words will either lack the desired effect, be outdated by the time you can speak them, or wind up being turned against you. 

And it is exactly the wrong reaction. 

Fear can be a powerful and informative instinct.  But the smartest people know that your words can also be powerful things.  To fall silent is to lose your seat at the table.  A loss is never permanent, but you cannot hope for a win unless you are sitting there.

A three-part strategy

This does not necessarily mean the next social media attack requires you to initiate a knee jerk, head-on response.  But it does mean executing a three-part strategy that is a viable alternative to falling silent.  

• First, that you should recover your own passion to articulate the positive values of your organization in a wide range of ways;

• Second, that you are at your strongest precisely when you are telling stories that reflect those values, rather than simply reacting, or reciting messages by rote;

• Third, that you should awaken that narrative passion in others - not just your traditional spokespersons, but everyone under the roof.

In short, be not afraid.  Tell great stories.  And build an army of storytellers. 

We call trainings that teach this strategy “narrative-based.”  We pioneered the narrative approach, and developed a proprietary methodology for teaching it that now has many imitators.  The original is as intuitive as it is uncommon.

The strategy works because it emphasizes turning your messages into stories.  Narratives, after all, are stickier than messages, and the Internet is inherently narrative.  Stories and the human brain more or less grew up together.  Little wonder narratives have greater cognitive resonance than a string of bullet points that are simply dumped on your audience.   

Your workforce - an “army” of storytellers

It is also scalable, internally and externally.  Narrative-based training leverages the ability of your entire workforce - not necessarily to be interviewed by a journalist at a financial publication, but to confidently handle pointed criticisms in both business and personal situations: from customer meetings and difficult conversations with colleagues, to backyard barbecues and family reunions.

“Being trained is still too sensitive a subject to tweet about. Word gets around at the coffee machine. ”

Many of the people we train today may never meet a reporter or go in front of a camera.  But they all utilize the same basic narrative skills.   

This is why what used to be called media training is better described today as communications training.  It is also why our trainings, on average, suddenly got larger over the last year and a half, as we showed many participants at once how to convey the same overarching narrative in very diverse ways.  Attendance at one of these trainings reached 500 people.

These days, it is not enough to train your top execs, although that is still a must.  It takes an army.

Why people don’t talk about it

Word of this strategy’s success spreads quickly, although not virally, because being trained is still too sensitive a subject to tweet about.  It gets around in old school, under-the-radar fashion: on internal listservs, in office cafeterias, and in quiet talks at the coffee machine. 

The leader of a private equity firm shared the following impression of his training in an email to his direct reports, and it led us to train close to a dozen startups they had partnered with. 

“It was HELL, but very good for me,” he wrote, capitalizing the H-word for emphasis.  “You MUST do it.”

Another day, another army of storytellers.  

Back to my long lost trainee.  In my renewed work with him that day, we did not churn out the standard litany of messages.  We used those messages to develop several clear, easy to convey high level topic narratives.  He could adapt them to a major presentation, to a panel discussion, or even – perish the thought – to a media interview.  

In the process, he rediscovered his passion for speaking out.  It’s high time the rest of us did the same.