“No comment” Really?

Posted on Feb 08, 2012

Tweet

One of the fringe benefits of having kids in hockey is that you get to meet other parents, and through winters of early morning practices and motel room impromptu gatherings during away tournaments, friendships are formed and interesting discussions evolve.

I no longer take my kids to hockey – they still play but they are adults now, so the parental responsibilities that saw me in countless rinks are now well behind me. In a way I miss it, not so much the getting up at 6am part, but the games and the conversations.

As you may or may not know, I have been developing and facilitating media training courses since leaving CBC in the early 90’s. In connection with this, I was in a conversation recently that reminded me of one of those evening sessions in a motel room. The conversation came around to media. One of the parents had been approached by a reporter to comment of some story, I guess because his job related to it somehow, and he shared that he felt awkward and rattled by the experience.

This prompted one of the other parents to volunteer some advice. “If I was ever approached by a reporter, I would just say NO COMMENT and that would be the end of that.” I bit my tongue.   

I sensed that the room wasn’t interested in a dissertation on how much of a mistake that response to a reporter would be, and the grief it could cause.  They may have gotten it anyway, if this exchange had occurred three beers later, but as they say, timing is everything.  The conversation moved on to the terrible referring or whether we would make it past the elimination round, or some such thing.

But long after that, I kept thinking back to my fellow hockey parent’s solution for dealing with what, for him, would be seen as an intrusion by a reporter. Somewhere along the line I came across a great example that illustrates why “no comment” is such a terrible thing to say.  It is such a wonderful little example that I have been using it in our media training courses ever since. 

The video clip that accompanies this blog comes from one of our media training sessions. Watch it and put yourself in the shoes of either person. Then ask yourself how that “no comment” is likely to work for you in this scenario? Let me know if you think it will end well?