So you are a politician or a talk show host or you run a news operation and you have said something or printed something, intentionally or accidentally, that was offensive to your audience.
How do you apologize?
Let’s look at the two most popular ways of late:
“If I offended anyone, I apologize.”
“If I was wrong, I apologize.”
Those are apologies? When I was six or seven, my confessor wouldn’t have let me get away with those kind of fake mea culpas. Forgive me father, if perhaps I sinned. I hate to think of the penance that would have followed. As adults, or reasonable facsimiles, we ought to know better and do better.
When we utter words that can be read by a large contingent of people as being racist or sexist or homophobic or hurtful, saying if I offended anyone doesn’t cut it. Of course you offended someone. How about just coming out and saying it and accepting the blame for your cutting and ignorant remarks? Try, “I know I offended lots of people and I am sorry. And I will learn from this experience.”
When you make an assumption and a statement, without any investigation or proof, that someone is faking a degree of disability to gain sympathy for his argument, for example, if I was wrong doesn’t cut it. How about a simple, “I was insensitive and I wanted to make him look phony because I disagree with his position and I apologize.”
The same holds true for men and women in charge of newsrooms. Mistakes are made every day. Own up to the mistakes and remember that a sincere “I’m sorry” goes a long way to gaining forgiveness. I vividly remember one time in Chicago when I was managing editor of the Sun-Times and I decided to hold a terrific feature story for a day for some reason I can’t recall. It was written by one of our most talented and elegant writers, who could make copy sing. What happened? The Tribune ran a not-as-good version of the same story one day ahead of us.
The reporter was rightly angry with me and I immediately went to him and told him I had made a mistake, that my decision was wrong, which it was in that fiercely competitive market. And I apologized. He looked at me and said, “That’s the first time in 30 years in this business that an editor ever admitted a mistake to me and said he was sorry.” He was still unhappy that he got beat, but our relationship turned into a deep and abiding friendship, one of mutual respect.
Yes, we have gotten better about publishing corrections, although some of them are so bare it’s difficult to tell what the mistake was in the first place. But we haven’t gotten much better about telling people how mistakes are made and what we are doing to make sure we will make fewer in the future.
We still aren’t as transparent as we need to be, telling news consumers what we know and what we don’t know, how we make decisions and why, simply what they can expect of those of us who operate in the shadows of the presses or cameras or computers. And, certainly, we are not, as a group, good and active listeners.
Bob Schieffer, the wise and respected and talented CBS newsman, who recently spoke at Poynter’s Leadership Academy, said that one of his constant reminders to journalists is to always answer your phone on the first ring. And listen and respond. He told about terrific stories he got as a young police reporter at the Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram doing just that.
I often tell editors to call their newsrooms to see what kind of reaction they receive to a question or to an idea. It is a valuable learning experience. Customer service is too often a foreign concept, looked upon by journalists as something other people in the building need to worry about.
Then it’s easy to say, “If only THEY had taken care of that problem.”
There’s that if again.
Can we agree to junk it when it’s time to accept responsibility for our behavior?
And if that’s too difficult to understand, I apologize.
