Roumen Dimitrov - Strategic Silence: Public Relations and Indirect Communication

Media release of MP Anthony Albanese.

Source: http://anthonyalbanese.com.au/media-statement-on-max-moore-wilton-retirement

To make sense of the release, one has to be familiar with its context. It suffices to say here that the Australian MP and Labor shadow minister Antony Albanese had a long history of political and personal animosity with the retiring Sydney Airport Corporation chairman. It dates back to when Albanese was transport minister and the resistance of the chairman to a second airport in Sydney. The Airport Corporation has the right but also obligation to be the first bidder the government should approach for undertaking such a project.

The message is in the layout. It is not only in the word Good, but also in the blank around it. Spatial silence replaces the text body. The shadow minister uses visual iconicity . In the concrete poetry , for example, the meaning of a word or phrase is not only lexical-semantic but also visual-iconic. In his verse Silence, Eugen Gomringer repeats that word many times in five consecutive lines. The verse looks like a wall, the bricks of which are made from the word silence. He leaves an empty space only in the middle of the third line. There, in the hole in the wall, so to speak, silence appears in the blank, as an optical illusion, through its absence (Gomringer, 1954).

In iconicity, not only signs become words but also words become signs. Signs become semiotic. They are linguistic and iconic. Images as spatial signs introduce sound imitation and symbolism, multidimensional order and metalanguage (Ephratt, 2005). Gomringers poetry speaks not about silence but through silence (Ephratt, 2008). Like in concrete poetry, the silence of Albanese says not less but more than his word Good. It is not the word that is the figure and the silence the background. The opposite takes place. The silence is the figure and the word the background.

Good is also strategically ambiguous. Only silence can carry its equivocal inferences. On the one hand, it looks absentmindedly disinterested. A nod in energy-saving mode, a tick. Being polite to the extent of formulaic. An innocuous, almost irrelevant gesture. On the other hand, Albanese lets pass his ill-concealed satisfaction. He breathes a sigh of relief in a lets-get-over-it fashion. His message, Lets not talk about, is purposefully ambiguous. One possible meaning is that he has been above the fray. Now, that it is over, he is cool. It is beneath him to talk about someone who is about to go. Another likely meaning still aims at the former adversary. An unremarkable event. Or the person in the event. He was almost absent in his presence. Why should I make him present in his absence?

As indirect communication, strategic ambiguity takes chances. But it is calculated, too. In his release, Albanese targets an elite of journalists and policy wonks who know, too well, the history of his rivalry with Moore-Wilton. It is rather embarrassing to add anything for them. As a career politician, he has staunch friends and enemies among them. It is unlikely that he would change their opinion.

What he cannot resist, however, is to earn more free media. Through iconicity and ambiguity, he can craft a message that is subtle but sticks (Heath & Heath, 2007). He can surprise and amuse them without reheating an unimpressive and tacky story. Everyone can make sense of what has not been said. Leaving to them to recall (or not) the airport saga, he does not patronise them with petty gloating. At the same time, he allows them to own it as they wish, but also to bring closure to it.