Mixed messages: What Bell Media, Rogers and Hockey Canada tell us about the art and challenge of crisis communications

Colin Horgan is a communications professional and a former journalist and speechwriter.

“What’s the vision for CTV National News going forward? And what made you believe a change in chief anchor was necessary to implement it?”

A CTV employee reportedly put those questions to Michael Melling, the vice-president of news for Bell Media, and Karine Moses, the company’s senior vice-president for content development and news, at a town hall last week. And they are good questions, ones that have been on the minds of many Canadians ever since Lisa LaFlamme, the anchor of the network’s flagship news program, announced that she’d been unceremoniously dumped. Since then, CTV has weathered a storm as the stories have piled up, including a report that Mr. Melling once suggested that Ms. LaFlamme’s grey hair looked bad on camera.

But Mr. Melling and Ms. Moses provided little of any use in their responses. “The vision is clear. We’re going to share it with you guys. We will engage you,” Ms. Moses replied cryptically. She also reportedly assured staff, vaguely, of the company’s commitment to employee welfare. “Know that mental health is one of our key pillars. There are things we need to look at: Where do we need to add more people? How do we rebalance work? This is part of our vision.”

It’s difficult to read these reported exchanges and believe that anyone at Bell Media – which is technically a communications company – has any experience communicating with people. Instead, the executive team appears to have delivered allusions to a vision that has yet to be revealed but seems to involve high-profile staff members being fired; a promise to share this strategic vision at some unknown point in the future, raising further questions about what it might include; and the reassurance, in the wake of this upheaval, that mental health – one of the company’s public-facing priorities – is a “key pillar,” the kind of terminology you’d expect in a quarterly earnings report, not a humane discussion with people who’ve suffered loss. (The news of Ms. LaFlamme’s departure came on the heels of the death of Allan Myers, the senior director of CTV National News.)

It was all rather cold and uncompromising – the language of a brand, not a human being.

But if Bell Media can take any solace, that’s because it’s hardly the only operation that’s bad at this. Over the summer, two other major Canadian organizations – Rogers and Hockey Canada – struggled to explain themselves to the public amid their own crises. Rogers took hours to respond to its customers during a massive network outage that affected more than 10 million customers, making them wait in silence. Hockey Canada, meanwhile, has deferred to its “journey” toward a better future – whatever that means – after two revelations of alleged sexual assaults, years later, involving members of Canadian World Junior Hockey teams.

Is there something about these organizations that makes it difficult for them to respond appropriately when things go wrong? Or is poor communication simply a symptom of another problem?

One of the annoying things about such modern corporate communications language is that a lot of it comes across as banal, to the point of being totally uninformative. I should know – I’ve written a lot of it. The thing is, in many cases, that’s by design. If communications language strikes you as simplistic, it’s likely because a lot of people need to understand it. If it’s clichéd, it might be because it’s communicating an idea that’s conceptual or new, so it must connect with something familiar. If it’s repetitive, it might be because of the evidence that people need to hear some things a lot before they actually listen.

This kind of communication is highly scrutinized, but it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. It’s like standing on a beach as the waves break at your feet; the ground you stand on shifts constantly and, from time to time, sinks beneath you, while the audience moves around, as do their expectations. This is another reason for the typically staid, generic and non-specific language: Often, it needs to suit a number of different purposes at once. To properly analyze crisis communications, then, we need to understand its intent and its target audience.

But another truism about crisis communications is that it’s easier, and usually more effective, if you’ve anticipated the crisis. Often a decision is made to communicate an idea, product or policy with the full knowledge that various sectors of society will hate it and complain – and while it’s not fun, you can account for it with proper planning. In the absence of foresight, though, you have to scramble.

This seems to be what happened at Rogers, Hockey Canada and Bell Media: Even though they should have seen their respective crises coming (to varying degrees), all three were ultimately blindsided, then discovered they couldn’t fall back on a level of public trust they had assumed was deeper than it was. That failure of vision was a bigger problem – and it’s perhaps why chaos ensued.

What makes Bell Media’s line of response uniquely confusing is that it was technically in control of how the personnel change would occur – but lost that control. Not only that, it clearly mistook its audience. Based on the executives’ responses, it seems they think the audience is CTV News viewers – but more pressingly, the actual audience is, or at least should be, the network’s reeling staff. And the crisis they’re dealing with may not really be Ms. LaFlamme’s exit – judging by the stories and reported questions at the town hall, that might just be a symptom of a deeper, systemic issue. If they’re talking about the wrong problem, it’s no wonder they’re using the wrong language.

The thing is, most of the time your audience probably does need to hear some tactical key messages – the banal term for those banal and repetitive talking points – but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they just need you to sound like a regular human being. As obvious as this sounds, talking the way people talk is actually a lot harder than creating the rote messaging, because regular language gives you less cover – there are fewer words to hide behind. Regular language requires honesty, which takes courage. But sometimes it’s worth it. If nothing else, it means you’ll never tell your staff their mental health is something as cold as a “key pillar.”

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