QUOTABLE QUOTES – CONTRADICTION AND DOUBLESPEAK
The International Quality and Productivity Centre (In conjunction with the Broadcast Development Group) is hosting a three day conference in July on Spin and the Media.
It’s an interesting idea – the IQPC says participants will benefit from “invaluable insights, best practice examples and knowledge from the creators, influencers, decoders and transmitters of news. Be it news of a corporate, political, social or political nature.” - and it might well be worth finding out what speakers like Freek Robinson (SABC), Jeremy Maggs (SAfm) and Deborah Patta (Etv) think about spin.
That’s as far as the media goes but, while the DA is represented by Dianne Kohler Barnard MP and the government by Lebona Mosia (head of communications in the Mpumalanga premier’s office – presumable the head of communications in the KwaZulu-Natal premier’s office, Cecil Msomi, was otherwise engaged), significantly the ANC has decided not to send anyone.
It’s a decision that makes a lot of sense – the ANC has a pretty shoddy record when it comes to communicating its message. Its statements are usually issued a day or two after an event, if its stance on something controversial is required, its spokespeople are “not available for comment” and then there’s the content of its communication which, when it doesn’t involve some sort of mad, over-the-top statement from the ANC Youth League, leans more toward rhetoric than substance. And, of course, that’s all when it’s not busy trying to take over the media itself; thereby, it presumes, negating any problem in the first place.
That’s by way of standard procedure, but it doesn’t stop there. If all other options are exhausted, the ANC and its members in government are perfectly happy to just do a complete about turn, deny an original statement, state the opposite is true and maintain that is what the party has always said.
That great writer George Orwell described this sort of linguistic manoeuvring as follows:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
(Sounds like an apt description of ANC Today.)
But we aren’t talking shades of grey here - at its worst, the ANC government is capable of a fundamental and absolute 180 degree turn: one day it’s black, the next day it’s white.
(Not that the ANC is the only party capable of this sort of inconsistency, just that it’s the most consistently inconsistent. The NNP and ID are also deserving of an honourable mention.)
And that’s the theme for this week’s edition of Quotable Quotes: contradiction and doublespeak.
Here are ten examples from the past few years. In each case, two contradictory quotes have been juxtaposed next to one another. You get two points for guessing who said each set of contradictory quotes and another two points for guessing the context in each case.
WHAT THEY SAID
ONE
Quote 1. “This is not, in fact, an accident. Any interference with any electricity installation is an exceptionally serious crime. It is sabotage”.
Quote 2.<
| Posted on 14/6/2007
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