Deferred sincerity

Good communication should be about passing on a clear message to one or more persons without the need for hype, hyperbole or spin. But increasingly, organisations are messing up their communication tactics by adopting deferred sincerity – saying things not as they know they really are but as they calculate they will most likely influence listeners. The recent regional elections in Italy and the divorce referendum campaign in Malta gave us ample examples of how deferred sincerity works.

Businesses, political parties and ecclesiastical institutions are very different organisations. But they have one thing in common – they all need to communicate their message to increasingly sophisticated audiences. Today people from the privacy of their homes analyse what they hear and see and when the time comes for them to pronounce their judgements in the secrecy of the voting cubicle, they do so with clinical skills.

I have used the term ‘ecclesiastical institutions’ rather than the word ‘Church’ because I strongly believe that we need to distinguish between the governance mechanism of the curia that needs to project the image of officialdom in a way that paints it in a positive light with members of society, and the more meta-physical concept of the church which is a conglomerate of people who strive to work and live by practicing their beliefs.

Communication experts often comment that negative campaigning rarely works. The Church is at its best as a communicator when it preaches love, tolerance and concern for those who suffer. It is at its worse when it uses fear as a tool to convince the faithful to conform with its orthodox thinking whenever outside forces threaten to destabilise this thinking. I am sure that most of our Church leaders agree with this. So, I find it difficult to understand why a powerful minority of clerics resorted to deferred sincerity when making statements about the implications of the introduction of divorce in Malta.

Some Church representatives were obviously not singing from the same hymn sheet, when they pronounced themselves on whether voting for divorce was indeed a matter of exercising one’s conscience free from threats of eternal damnation. They also failed to show how the rights of cohabitating non-practicing Christians who felt they have a civil right to regularise their legal position once their first marriage failed could be reconciled with the continuing legislative vacuum that fails to acknowledge the reality of cohabitating non-married couples.

Even more striking was the deferred sincerity of the Italian Prime Minister who turned the recent regional elections in Italy into a referendum on his leadership. He resorted to all forms of deferred sincerity to paint a black picture of his centre-left opposition. TV cameras caught him speaking to an embarrassed President Obama in a G8 meeting about how “the Communist judiciary” in Italy were a threat to democracy. Berlusconi knows full well that this is not true. As a Corriere della Sera journalist remarked, how can Berlusconi be credible in what he says about the judiciary when he has been found not guilty in 33 trials against him and has so far not spent one day in prison.

The Italian Prime Minister increased the dose of hyperbole and negative campaigning when he stated that if the electorate voted for the centre-left candidate Giuliano Pisapia for mayor of Milan, this city would become “an Islamist gypsy land”. One of his admirers, the former Minister Clemente Mastella, was even more melodramatic when he declared that if the Neapolitans were to elect the centre-left candidate “he (Mastella) would commit suicide”. Some wicked critics of Mastella are anxiously waiting for him to keep his word as Luigi De Magistris, a former judge, obtained a stunning 65 per cent of the votes in Naples.

In a society where people are more prepared to analyse arguments and not to accept any statement that does not pass the test of common sense, every large organisation needs to acknowledge that honesty is always the best policy. People can sense deferred sincerity whenever their leaders resort to it. Spin may still be a favoured tool of communication, but it is not as effective as many seem to think.

Negative campaigning will continue to be used as a means of convincing people on proposals that are not quite convincing when scrutinised by an informed and clinical public. But scaring people by painting those who disagree with our views as losers or dangerous misfits is a sure way to antagonise the moderate elements in our society.

jcassarwhite@yahoo.com