The End of “No Comment”
By Gregory Quinn, Content Strategist/Editor, Zimmerman/Edelson, Inc.
It’s been the bastion of the guilty, the refuge of the litigious, and the fallback of the ill-prepared. It’s the venerable “pleading the fifth,” and its time is running out. Thanks to our all-access media, total disregard for personal privacy and insatiable lust for having an opinion, “no comment” has no place in the modern world. Au revoir, no comment. Us PR professionals knew thee well.
We had it real good there for a while. We had the right to remain silent, and, perhaps more accurately, the right to put it off until later. By saying “no comment,” everyone from elected officials to suspiciously toned professional athletes could respond to a difficult query by simply saying nothing, shielding themselves behind a blissful bubble of conflict avoidance and perceived ignorance. Not anymore. Now we can know everything with the help of a passable wireless network. That’s the downfall, it seems, of unlimited access to information; there’s no excuse anymore to not have an answer.
Would anyone believe us if we declined to answer? I mean, who doesn’t have a comment these days? We live in a comment culture! Every article we read online ends with a DELIGHTFUL scroll of well-thought arguments and observations. What does it say about us if the whole world has an opinion and we’re keeping our lips sealed? And if we do elect to say “no comment,” we better hope that’s exactly what we mean. Because if we’ve ever had an opinion on the matter at any point, you can be confident someone will track it down. There’s no such thing as non-disclosure anymore; if we’ve expressed our ideas in any forum, it’s going to be exposed.
Maybe “no comment” was overrated all along anyway. Consulting with the vast archives of information available in my mind as I sit in this café pretending to work, I have identified the two most famous examples of “no comment” in American history, and both were — by any estimation — abject failures. The first comes courtesy of baseball’s rogue gallery of muscle-bound beefcakes, responding to the United States government’s totally appropriate investigation of steroids in baseball with charming variants of “no comment,” whether it was Mark McGwire’s insistence that he was not there to talk about the past (at a forum explicitly designed to talk about the past), or Sammy Sosa’s brilliant claim that the English language had simply vanished from his brain (our most famous example of sin comentarios). McGwire, Sosa and the rest couldn’t have looked guiltier of steroid use if they testified with syringes sticking out their left biceps. They would have been better served shouting “steroids!” at Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (look it up) as loud as they could.
Example number two comes courtesy of that paragon of truth, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Responding to a 2011 email inquiry regarding his wife’s interest-free, half-a-million-dollar debt to Tiffany & CO, Newt Gingrich responded with — you guessed it — “no comment.” And well, all hell broke loose. SHOCKER ALERT: It seems that the diamond industry isn’t the most ethical racket in town; more than a few pundits opined that perhaps Mrs. Gingrich’s sweet deal with Tiffany’s had at least something to do with the fact that she worked on the House Agriculture Committee and thus could influence mining policy. Not exactly a smoking-gun accusation, I know, but there’s really only two explanations: 1) It’s nothing more than a mere conflict of interest, or 2) It’s textbook bribery. By saying “no comment,” Newt all but guaranteed the public would believe option two.
I want to shout this from the mountaintops: The cover-up is often more incriminating than the crime. The public forgives, it understands. What we have seen over and over, however, is that the public will not tolerate being manipulated or lied to. Say what you will about the firebrand political campaigns of people like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders — they have taught PR practitioners at least one valuable lesson: The masses won’t stand for being made to look dumb.
Everyone knows that “no comment” essentially means “I’m guilty.” Everyone. If you use it, you’re basically saying to the public “I think you’re stupid enough for this to work.” That’s infinitely worse than just admitting to whatever the accusation was in the first place.
The changing media has forced us all to adapt, in some ways for the worse. But the death of “no comment” may be one of the best results of this over-exposed new reality.
