Crafting a message that works

The past five years, since I went public on gender issues, have been like bootcamp on media engagement in a hostile environment. Here are some tips on ensuring your message lands

I’ve always loved teaching. As well as a side business offering writing training to journalists, civil servants and senior businesspeople – something I started doing while I was still at The Economist – I recently started offering training on messaging and engaging with the media as well. If you, or someone you know, is interested in finding out more, here is how to get in touch.

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The logic is that the past five years, since I went public on gender issues, have been like bootcamp in an especially hostile environment. Everything I say is interpreted in the most uncharitable way possible by people who hate me; there’s been a blackout in large chunks of the media on anything I might want to say; and large numbers of people I want to speak to have been outright propagandised. Ordinary words have had their meanings destabilised or ruled unusable. Basic facts are now disputed.

As I wrote in my most recent column for the Critic, we’re living in a time of deliberate disinformation of the sort that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed calling “bullshit”. 

“In his book On Bullshit, published in 2005, Frankfurt contrasts liars, who knowingly seek to convince others of a falsehood, with bullshitters, who don’t care and may not even know whether what they say is true or false.

“Liars seek to deceive their listeners about the content of their speech. Bullshitters are much more dangerous: they want you to think they seek to speak the truth, when in fact they don’t care about the truth and are rather aiming to convey an impression about themselves.”

This is a very challenging environment to get a message out in, because ordinary words and straightforward facts can’t be taken for granted. Many of your listeners firmly believe falsehoods or at least think everything is too complicated to know who’s right or wrong. You’re up against people who haven’t the slightest concern for truth or accuracy but spew out nonsense.

If you’re not careful you can spend all your time trying to debunk what your enemies say – but they didn’t say it to be believed, or at least not precisely. They said it to confuse, to waste your time, to screw with public discourse, to demoralise their opponents and to make people in general cynical, so they believe nothing – and do nothing.

Experience in communicating a message and interacting with the media in such a hazardous and confusing environment has set me up well to teach these skills not just to people concerned with sex’n’gender but more generally. No matter the subject, the principles of messaging and media engagement are the same. 

Here are some of the most useful things I’ve learned about messaging (I will return to tips on interacting with the media in a future edition).

Most people know nothing about your issue. I often hear people say “why don’t people care about [insert cause here]?” Well, you don’t care about their cause, if they have one – most people don’t, they’re just trying to get by. And life is short. 

Do you know what’s happening in Xinjiang right now, and what should be done about it? Can you name the president of Venezuela, and tell me what he’s doing wrong? Can you explain inflation-targeting, and tell me whether the UK monetary-policy committee is too hawkish or too doveish? Well, the way you responded is how most people feel about whatever it is you want to convince them of. They owe you no more than you owe someone whose big issue is modern slavery in Xinjiang, Nicolás Maduro’s disastrous rule in Venezuela, or the principles of monetary policy. It’s on you to persuade them that your topic matters.

You can’t say everything on your topic. In fact, on any specific occasion you can say almost nothing. My working definition of a good interview is “three strong points and no clangers”. This means it takes absolutely ages to get your message out, shift public opinion or – and this is surely the end goal – bring about the change you want to see. As a rough rule, around the point at which you think you simply cannot bear to say whatever it is even one more time is about the point that the average person may, if you’re lucky, have become dimly aware that there is something going on.

Use your terms, not your opponent’s. Don’t use their words and framing even to disagree with it in the course of an interview or debate: simply rephrase in your terms and then answer. For example, if you’re asked about “trans rights”, answer about “women’s rights”, or “universal rights” or “child safeguarding” – don’t even say a bridging sentence about how “I don’t see this as a matter of trans rights, I see it as…”. If someone says something about “trans kids”, answer about “children who are confused about or distressed by their sex”. 

Universalise. A surprising number of people hear “women’s rights” or “gay rights” and bristle, thinking “what about men?” or “what about straight people?” It’s silly but common, and it stops them from engaging in an empathetic way, even when your message is one that they might be sympathetic to. 

So it’s helpful to say something like: “Most people agree that female athletes, just like male ones, deserve fair competition. The facts about physical differences between the sexes means that female athletes can only have fair competition in events that are just for them.” Or: “gay people, just like everyone else, need and deserve freedom of association.” Or: “Most people recognise that children need adults to look out for them, and don’t have the maturity or life experience to make major, irreversible decisions they might regret later on.”

Propose solutions. If the end state is unattainable, signal it but also give an immediate, achievable step. Say who needs to act, and if someone is doing it right, use them as an example. “Ultimately, we need to return to the way things were, in which no records of sex were falsifiable. In the short term the most important thing that needs to happen is that equality and anti-discrimination law stops conflating sex – the biological reality of male and female – with people’s feelings about themselves and their self-declaration. If the Supreme Court doesn’t resolve this in the upcoming judgment in the For Women Scotland case, which is due soon, it’ll be up to Parliament to act.”

Or: “What needs to happen is that sporting authorities return to the way things were, when only women and girls – people who are actually female, not people who merely identify as female – can take part in female events. If there’s any doubt about someone’s sex, it can easily be verified by a one-off, cheap, non-invasive cheek swab. If sports authorities won’t act to protect the female category, governments should cut off all public funding. Several sporting authorities, including rugby and most recently ice hockey, have implemented this policy, proving it’s possible.”

Engage people’s compassion rather than spewing facts. There’s a place for discussions about sections 9(1) and 9(3) of the Equality Act, and what they mean for how the Gender Recognition Act interacts with the Equality Act – and it’s in legal arguments between specialists and in front of judges. For a general audience you need to make accurate but non-technical statements about such dry matters as fast as you can, and get straight to why it matters to real people. You need to move as fast as possible to harms and benefits, to victims and villains.

So: “There’s a glitch in the way equality and anti-discrimination law works in this country. Without getting technical, the Supreme Court has to decide whether the law that allows female-only spaces, and protects women against sex discrimination, was accidentally made much more complicated and harder to uphold by a law that allows a tiny number of people to get paperwork that conceals their actual sex.

“It’s really important that equality and anti-discrimination law can operate properly, because it’s the basis for all sorts of everyday services, like single-sex toilets and changing rooms, and specialist ones, like rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters. It’s also what stops employers from paying women less than men for the same work. If the Supreme Court concludes that this law has indeed been broken then the government needs to act fast to fix it.”

Obviously people who disagree with me would disagree with the substance of the examples above. But that’s good! If they liked what I was saying, even a little bit, that would be a sign that their language and thinking had infected mine. So even while I’m checking that what I say lands as well as possible with people who know or care nothing about my subject, I’m also checking that my ideological enemies actively hate what I’m saying. I don’t want a single word I say to offer the slightest support for their position.

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