CONNECT: The phrase infests job ads. It lurks among such jaded staples as "proven track record", "leadership talent", "dynamic team" and the ubiquitous "packages" - "remuneration packages", "competitive packages", "generous packages".
Ads that use such weary guff frequently stipulate that applicants are expected to have - here it is - "excellent communication skills".
It's invariably "excellent" communication skills; "adequate" ones, such as the ability to talk or write coherently, are not enough. It's ironic that such ads don't have excellent communication skills. If they had they wouldn't bombard potential applicants with so many clichés. The portentousness and hyperbole are to be expected, of course, but the clichés mulch language into sad, overblown jargon.
Anyway, there was controversy this week about Bryan Dobson, the RTÉ newscaster, coaching health boards' chief executives on their communication skills. He reportedly taught them how to deal with media interviews. Critics complained that Dobson was thereby undermining his own and the wider media's function of extracting information from people with power.
He agreed and apologised. RTÉ has done likewise. That's fair enough. The episode has been revealing and instructive, however. The punters seeking to polish their communication skills must be suspected of wanting to improve their ability to be uncommunicative, without undue loss of plausibility. It seems as if it was really uncommunication skills they sought.
Like job ads appealing for excellent communication skills, such deception is truly Orwellian: words frequently mean their opposite. You might argue that it's a communication skill to be able to talk or write confidently while serving your own purposes and communicating nothing of value. Politicians, after all, try it all the time.
But evasion, dissembling, fudging and the rest of the tricks they use are contemptuous of people. There may indeed be some skill in mastery of the techniques required, but it is the skill of concealment, not of communication. It is certainly absurd that a publicly financed outfit such as RTÉ might train public servants in ways to avoid serving the public.
Under such a system we finance our own ignorance. Paying for information is one thing, but paying to be denied it is quite another. Mind you, the health boards' chief executives are not unique in seeking to buy a set of Orwellian "communication skills": thousands of
prominent people do likewise. Many giveaway signs tell you an interviewee has been coached,
however.
An old staple such as "I'm glad you asked me that question" can still be heard occasionally but, exhausted by overuse, is rare now. Excessive smiling, eye contact and affability are always suspicious, too, as is the galling device of answering unasked questions. Reeling off selective statistics, intended to baffle rather than clarify, constitutes, like gushing "sincerity", another favourite "communication skill".
The controversy about Dobson's coaching of health board head honchos raged early this week. By midweek RTÉ news was leading its main bulletins on hospital bed closures. Clearly this story had been some time in preparation, and it was strong and accessible journalism, albeit arguably oversold on a day when 24 people were killed in the Middle East. More pertinently, however, it was tainted by the controversy that preceded it.
Dobson introduced the "exclusive survey" at the top of Wednesday's 6.01 News. Then Aileen O'Meara, RTÉ's health correspondent, reported on State-wide bed closures before taking part in a studio interview with Una O'Hagan, Dobson's co-presenter.
Between O'Meara's report and interview, economics editor George Lee emoted and editorialised in Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, in Crumlin.
After the ad break Hugh Bredin, a consultant urologist at University College Hospital in Galway, was interviewed to confirm the awfulness of health cuts. His interview had, of course, been flagged before the ads.
The entire package (sorry) was solid journalism, but because of the shadow cast by the coaching controversy it acquired a detracting PR aspect.
It seemed as if RTÉ was yelling at viewers that, coaching of health board bosses notwithstanding, it could and would condemn the health service shambles. Whether or not this showed "excellent communication skills" is debatable, but the context of controversy infected a fine and worthy report with an unnecessarily shrill note.
It's not only the health service that is sick. Irish media too suffer injuries by the paradoxical stress on "excellent communication skills", many of which are designed to maintain and even increase public ignorance. It's reasonable that individuals and organisations should seek to present themselves in a favourable light, but the infestation of reality by spin and sundry PR sophistry is increasingly cancerous.
Communication can be considered to operate between the poles of "tell" and "sell". Ideally journalism tells and advertising sells, but neither, of course, is ever utterly pure. Between the poles there's a continuum of hybrid forms, and Ahern's Ireland, like Blair's Britain and Bush's US, is being perverted by a proliferation of outfits selling techniques to hoodwink the media.
Mulched language mulches minds. Coaching more talking heads to sell us a line to cover the truth with alleged "excellent communication skills" and all the perversion that inflated term now implies is dangerous. There's enough guff already.