Touchdown: Flaherty pushes language button

In our Veritas Media Coaching sessions, we often talk about the potential power – and pitfalls – of particularly strident language. Just how that is defined varies, depending on the communicator and the circumstances at hand, but I submit that federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was being pretty provocative when he used the word “wasted” in describing what he absolutely didn’t want to see happen to the money Ottawa is providing to General Motors to help keep the foundering auto giant afloat. There are billions of taxpayer dollars in the offing, and Flaherty knows that by injecting such a hot-button word into his comments on the federal lifeline, it would not go unnoticed nor unreported. It’s a classic example of deliberately harnessing the power of strong language for a strategic communications gain. Inadvertantly blurt out a hot-button word in the heat of a moment and the consequences can often be disastrous, but deliberately and strategically use one to amplify an important message, and it can be a communications Touchdown.