What to Say When You don’t Know Yet
Every crisis opens with a gap between what leaders know and what the public wants to hear. Officials facing a chemical spill or a disease outbreak feel strong pressure to close that gap with confident language. Confident language buys calm for a day or two. When the facts shift, as they almost always do in the first week of a crisis, the institution pays for that calm in lost belief.
The Liar’s Dividend: How Deepfakes Changed the Burden of Proof
For most of modern history, institutions could settle an argument by pointing to evidence almost no one could forge. A video showed what a governor said at the podium, and a signed memo showed what an agency had promised. Generative AI broke that arrangement, and it did so in two directions at once.
Plain language is a trust strategy
The 2023 Survey of Adult Skills found that 28% of U.S. adults read at or below the lowest proficiency level, up from 19% in 2017. The last national assessment of health literacy, in 2003, found that only 12% of adults were proficient and more than a third scored at basic or below. An agency that writes for the reader it wishes it had is deciding who gets to take part in public life, and the people it leaves out are often the ones its programs were built to serve.
Public Trust is the communications Problem of the Decade
Here's the uncomfortable thing about the communications business right now: institutions are communicating more than they ever have, and being believed less than they ever have.
Every agency has a website, a newsletter, and a social media presence. Every nonprofit has an email list and a content calendar. Every campaign has a rapid-response operation. We've got more channels, more content, more reach, and more polish than ever — and the polls have moved in the opposite direction for a generation.