Transparency, Part 2: “Truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

For almost 20 years, beginning in the early 1980s, I joined with two journalists from the electronic media to form a media consulting firm whose primary responsibility to help prepare spokespersons for potentially grueling media interviews. For example, we prepared representatives who appeared on 49 different 60 Minutes programs as well as too-many-to-count appearances on such TV staples of the time as Nightline, Dateline, Meet the Press, etc. Our clients included executives from major and small corporations, political leaders (including soon-to-be U.S. presidents), sports figures, entertainers. I even made several trips to Montana to work with the leader of a religious cult.

A lot of our work involved traveling to wherever our clients wanted us to teach a one-day course on how to handle a media interview.

As luck would have it, a couple of years after the company was founded, we managed to convince the hierarchy of Texas Instruments, whose media policy at the time was a very simple and direct "We don’t talk to the press" to take our course. One of the TI vice presidents who took it was the head of sales for the company who shortly thereafter came to us and said "I have thousands of employees in our sales force who will never have to deal with a reporter, but they have to deal with even tougher questions from potential customers. Could you modify your program to help them?"

Of course we did and as a result I had the opportunity to travel to TI locations all over the globe to conduct a program we called "A Successful Strategy for Answering Questions."

One of the points I stressed in this program was a person is not required to answer a question in the way the questioner wants it answered. I called those types of queries the "When did you stop beating your spouse?" question. My favorite example was this: I’ve asked a question. You’ve answered it. And I reply: "That’s interesting, because just three days ago I was talking to your boss and he told me just the opposite. Which one of you is lying?"

I was thinking about that today because it made me realize that I forgot to mention one major category of accusers in my essay about those who accuse municipal officials of "lack of transparency." And that’s those who hear answers that don’t jive with their preconceived notions of what they believe the correct answers should be. In fact, these types even form groups, one of the most prominent being The Flat Earth Society.

These are the close-minded, the prejudiced, the ones not open to ideas other than their own, people not willing to accept the notion that what they fervently believe to be true may, in fact, not be true after all, that all their assumptions are based on false premises.

So here’s some friendly advice: Pay absolutely no attention to anyone who claims "lack of transparency." They are simply advertising their own inadequacies. If you are really interested in the topic being discussed, conduct your own independent research. Seek the truth of the matter for yourself with a completely open, unprejudiced mind and be willing to accept the findings, whatever they may be.

Incidentally, for those who haven’t already figured it out, the honest answer to the "Which one of you is lying?" question is simply "I didn’t hear my boss say that, but here’s what I know to be the facts of the matter."