The headlines are full of scandals and tragedies: a celebrated actress is revealed to have a long history of racist posts on social media; a beleaguered awards organization finally cuts ties with its title sponsor after protests over the latter’s financial stake in weapons manufacturing; an education minister fires a school board in order to reinstate police officers in schools.
Examples like these are endless, and what follows each time is predictable: a prepared statement from those involved, seeking to deflect criticism, regain approval, and restore reputations. The language is banal, conciliatory, often so vague that a person unfamiliar with the inciting event would have no idea what the statement is actually about. (After accidentally calling a former member of a Nazi division a “hero” in 2023, Anthony Rota, then speaker of the House of Commons, issued a statement saying, “In my remarks following the address of the president of Ukraine, I recognized an individual in the gallery. I have subsequently become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision to do so.”) Tragedies are met with platitudes; accusations are side-stepped or couched in bizarrely indirect language. (Former Toronto mayor John Tory, in his resignation, characterized his affair with a staffer as “a relationship . . . that did not meet the standards to which I hold myself as mayor and as a family man.”) Often, a statement serves to correct or cancel out a prior, unscripted utterance. (“I have defended each and every one of the minorities in this world and supported any event against racism, [suppressing] freedom of religion[,] or homophobia,” the actress Karla Sofía Gascón said in a statement, after journalist Sarah Hagi uncovered many racist social media posts she had made about Muslims.)
It’s easy to ignore how insidious statements have become, gradually replacing the old mainstay of reporting: actual answers to actual questions. Rather than addressing frustrations generated by opacity, the response from those in positions of public influence and trust is to retreat even further: less direct access, fewer questions that require genuine responses, more public relations professionals stacking words into brick walls designed to obscure your view.
Occasionally, a statement misses the mark badly enough to become a scandal of its own. Following a mass shooting at a Michigan university in February 2023, for example, an office at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee issued a statement to its staff and students about the events. But the Vanderbilt statement was different; as reported in the student paper, the Vanderbilt Hustler, many were outraged by a line at the end attributing the statement to ChatGPT, a generative AI tool. “There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” one student told the paper.
But what seemed embarrassing for the university, which swiftly said that staff involved in the email had “stepped back from their responsibilities,” was that they had been caught in the routine activity of expressing a wholly manufactured statement and passing it off as a sincere emotional response. Generative text tools like ChatGPT are troubling for many reasons—they perpetuate misinformation and conspiracy theories, spew hate speech, and have a hefty carbon footprint—but when it comes to the already hollow, artificial nature of public statements, it’s hard to argue that AI tools are destroying anything with value.
While much ink has been spilled over the decline of journalism jobs, less attention has been paid to a related phenomenon: the bloating of the communications profession. These jobs share a common skill set, and many burnt-out or laid-off journalists find refuge in a communications role. Between 2016 and 2021—the two most recent censuses—the number of professionals in public relations, advertising, and marketing in Canada grew by 57 percent. Over the same period, the number of journalists shrank by 12 percent. In 2022, reporter for The Tyee Christopher Cheung noted that in British Columbia, communications professionals outnumbered reporters eighteen to one. It’s hard to imagine that trend abating, given that each week it seems another media outlet announces a round of mass layoffs.
This shift has happened amid an exceptionally bleak era of government access—a crisis Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration promised to solve, without success or even much in the way of effort. Statements aren’t new, but the degree to which we are forced to interact with them is—because there is simply no other way in which public employees communicate. Even when our federal party leaders trade insults, they do so indirectly—by issuing statements to the public.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail—and when you have too many communications professionals, every crisis looks like a communications crisis. In November 2023, Trudeau hired Max Valiquette, a marketer focused on reaching millennials and Gen Z, to address his plummeting popularity. “The government’s response was not to own up to that, not to accept blame, not to pivot, not to figure out a kind of strategic change, not to start real conversations about how to fix these things,” Justin Ling pointed out on the podcast Commotion, “it was to hire a new marketing director.”
Attempting to solve entrenched problems with marketing is not a tactic exclusive to politics. The University of Alberta recently scrapped its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy—in the wake of a policy proposal from the province’s reigning United Conservative Party, which would strip funding from universities maintaining DEI offices—and replaced it with an “access, community and belonging” policy—a rebrand that reveals the policy was a slogan all along.
The sloganeering at the University of Alberta demonstrates the bipartisan frustration with statements: some are offended by the language itself, while others are offended that the language addresses none of the actual problems it gestures to. The temporary embrace of DEI has not solved the racism and inequality that its adopters promised to correct; instead, public institutions have borrowed the language of inclusivity for their statements, crafting a public image of thoughtfulness and empathy that’s hollow at the core. As with land acknowledgements, often uttered at institutions built on unceded First Nations land without any self-awareness or deliberate irony, the words themselves are treated as action. And if the words fail to placate and appease the masses, the solution is not to look at the deeper frustrations and fissures; it’s to come up with some new formulaic phrases.
The elephantine memory of the internet has also hastened the onset of statement culture. Now that any text message, video, or social media post documenting a genuine, ugly sentiment can be unearthed at any time, many people are cautious about their public presentation. This caution often arrives too late to be useful; no statement in the world can fully erase the unvarnished image of, for example, dressing up in brownface before being elected as prime minister.
It’s worth considering whether a statement has ever effectively persuaded its intended audience that the subject did not mean the things they said or did. But this is the power of a statement: it eclipses the thoughtless, revealing candour that prompted it to become the public narrative, by virtue of being accepted and repeated. Forgiveness for mistakes should be possible in a just society, but it should follow from genuine remorse and reparations—not from outsourced platitudes wielded like a tranquilizer dart for outrage. As journalists and readers, we should be critical of a world where we are prevented from engaging with our representatives and leaders; where harms are direct but apologies are only offered at a remove; where we are told that the most authentic version of a person is the one drafted and approved by somebody else.
If you look for them, you’ll start to see statements everywhere, in the immediate wake of any scandal or public tragedy. The parties involved are shocked. They’re standing with victims. They’re listening and learning. Maybe they’re gesturing at doing something more concrete, but always at some indeterminate time in the future. This tends to go nowhere. The statement is all there is. Like an ouroboros, it exists only to swallow itself. Everyone wants to say the right thing, particularly if it excuses them from having to do anything at all.
