Spin Cycles: Calling Dr. Spin
Interview with Dan Miles
Director of Communications to the Minister of Finance
February 2, 2007
CBC News
IB: Was there something about your experience as a TV journalist that you thought you could bring to the table when you switched over to political communications?
DM: No question about it! As a journalist you learn the system, you learn how to grab a sound bite, you look for things, you recognize what a story is! What makes a story, and what is important, the important elements of a story. And quite frankly those are elements that are quite valuable when you get to the government's side of the table. I think that the biggest thing that the communications on the government's side can bring to the table and what they try to focus on is anticipation. You have to be able to anticipate the question, and then you have to be able to anticipate the issue and then you can go from there to try to craft a message to try and get you message out… "put out the fire" so to speak.
IB: Take me through the process of what happens when you are about to roll out a major policy announcement.
DM: Clearly I mean, to me the foundation has got to be the policy and it's got to be a good policy. I've had in the time that I've worked in government I've seen the challenges posed by trying to communicate a bad policy. And it is very difficult if you have a good sound policy to work with then you know, you are ahead of the game so to speak. But that is only the beginning! You could have the greatest policy in the world but if it is not communicated properly, or not communicated at all people are not going to know about it, and it is not going to serve the purpose and the people of the province or the country and it certainly its not going to serve the government or the party well! You start with a good solid policy and then you dissect that policy and see what are important to people because that is was really resonates. What is important to folks in Ontario, or out in rural Ontario whatever your policy might be. And then you cease on those, and its not unlike a journalist, you ask yourself; what is the lede* . You know, as a journalist you never bury the lede. That is a cardinal rule. You take the opposite side and you want to lede with the lede. Basically what you are trying to do for journalist is to make it easy, and make your lede their lede. That is a crucial part of what we do.
[*Editor's note: "lede" is common shorthand for the "lead" as in "the lead or first story in the newscast." It is spelled that way to avoid confusion with the metallic element called lead.]
IB: It's interesting that you should say that because in the press release you issued at the time of the income trust announcement your lead was about tax fairness. I can see why you would want that to be the headline because it is a better headline for you, but it struck me that you had buried the lede there.
DM: Well I mean, income trust, there was a lot of focus on it as simple stand-alone issue. But I mean from our prospective this is about tax fairness! The whole idea, the whole reason minister Flaherty did what he did was to level the playing field between trusts and corporations and also to provide tax relief to some of the senior folks who have invested in income trusts and would have been affected by this announcement. To us, the whole idea, the headline of this is tax fairness that is the motive behind the policy here
IB: Well that's what you wanted the headline to be. You wanted to steer reporters in that direction.
DM: Well clearly, if I may from my perspective is to be good at what we do, we have to make it as easy as possible for journalist. They shouldn't have to be reaming through reading pages and pages and paragraphs of material to try and find what we are trying to tell them. What it is that you are trying to communicate to the people of Canada. If I can go back to tax fairness for a second, it was about the package! Ultimately, a lot of people focus on one component of the package. But tax fairness is about the package of items including income trust, including leveling the playing field, including corporate tax cuts, including pension splitting for seniors, and including a reduction in the age credit for seniors. So it was more than just one thing but obviously reporters and business reporters have focused on just one element of the package.
IB: What about preparing the Minister for the questions he is going to be asked and other preparations for the rollout?
John Baird
DM: Well once you have the policy, then you have identified the components of the policy you that you think are front and centre and are important to people and what are going to resonate with people. Then you determine what it is that is going to help portray that; what is going to help paint the picture in the minds of Canadians. What will help you paint that picture? Then you develop an event. And this depends on the gravity and importance of the policy, as there are a number of factors that determine what your event is going to be. And then if it is deemed that is to be of great significant then obviously you are going to develop and event and what is the picture of that event going to be? This is crucially important because at the end of the day it is going to be the picture that is painted that will be in the minds of Canadians. If I can use our drug treatment event as an example; on any given day we are competing with 100's of news items coming in from around the world especially in the world that we live in today where everything can come from satellite and online so competition is quite fierce to gain attention in the media and with the drug treatment even that we did, clearly it was a controversial policy and it was something that wanted to portray to get across to people of the importance, and we wanted to grab their attention, and that Is exactly what we did. It is something that to this day people are talking about. And minister Baird wondered how the conversation went, it was a Sunday morning if I recall correctly and I was in the office and he was on the phone, and he said we needed to do something with needles because this was obviously the instrument creating the problem. So we had a chat about it, and basically I said we cannot use needles it's just not fees able! Because of disease so we couldn't do it, so we used brand new hypodermic needles and I said you've got to paint the picture, you've got to reach your hands into the box and grab a 2 big handful of these needles and deliver your lines, deliver the message and then just drop them and they would scatter and flow all over the table. That is something to this day that people remember.
IB: You knew that would be a powerful image that it would be on all the newscasts.
DM: Yea! Well I didn't know it would be on all the newscasts but I knew that it would grab their attention I knew it was something they could not ignore. And it was something that was a startling image but I think it got the message across, it basically allowed people to see how serious we were. About the policy but also about the problem, how serious the problem was and it was a groping visual image
IB: What about the wallpaper, the image we see behind the Minister?
DM: Well I mean wallpaper, whether you are watching the football game on Sunday or newscast or event newscast; it's within your picture. It provides another element. So in this day of instant news and instant media, you know you can look at the picture and know exactly what it is about
IB: And a lot of people watch TV with the sound off anyway.
DM: Well that's true, it's absolutely true! But in this day when people are really really busy and we've got competing news papers and competing internet and we've got competing wires and so on and so forth, you know people don't have the time to sit down and spend hours reading through stuff. People quite often skim and, and look at pictures and read headlines and the whole point is so that when someone looks at that picture they know exactly what it is about. They don't have to spend a whole lot of time about it. They can look at the picture and say yea ok! It is about the giants, I see their logo in the background.
IB: And sometimes you have to get complex issues down into 2 or 3 words.
DM: You are talking about the headlining, yea right? And quite frankly its important to be able to communicate something in terms that resonate with people but also simply and effectively and that comes down to not a lot of verbiage something that you can boil down into something that they can remember, something that grabs them. Certainly you want to provide more information, but you want to catch their interest initially. And if you don't catch their interest initially, they are never going to read about your policy anyway. But you've got to grab them and then they'll go "oh, maybe I'll read more about that! That sounds interesting!"
IB: What about the talking points? How do you come up with the talking points and how are they used?
DM: Again it depends on your event, on how significant your event is. Lately, in the current job that I have been doing, the talking points could be anything from 10-minute brief remarks to the budget speech and those are what I have had to work on lately in the coarse of my responsibilities here. Basically what you want to do is to articulate the policy and you want to weave in some of those lines that are going to grab people's attention. Some of those lines that when you guys are out there and you hear a recording and you say "wow, that is my sound bite" I mean you actually identify some of those, and you say ok, here I am going to explain the policy and then I am going to throw in a nice sound bite because I know that is what you are looking for and that is what I am looking to get on the news to try to articulate our policy.
IB: And so you help the Minister craft the sound bites?
DM: Yea, there is no question! The minister and all the ministers I've worked with they were all very effective at it and they recognized what a sound bite was and quite frankly it comes back to from my perspective, the job of the journalist that much easier. That is my job, to make your job easier. And if I can make your job easier then you can look at our policy look at our event, look at what we do a little more favorably
IB: You say you want to make our job easier, but you don't get much appreciation for that. You get called a spin-doctor and what not. Not much thanks for that.
DM: You know I was on your side of the fence for quite some times and you are a little cynical, there is no question about it! But you know I've got my job and you've got your job and my job is to communicate a policy and your job is to try and determine if I am feeding you a bill of goods or trying to get to the bottom of the policy and let people know if it is a good policy or if there are flaws in it or whatever. My job is to try and articulate to Canadians the benefits of our policy. Your job is to in a fair and balanced way to extend that to Canadians and perhaps provide them with a bit of commentary.
IB: Going back to the drug policy announcement, did it come off the way you wanted it to?
DM: That was reported in the wall street journal. It was reported on the national news right across the country on every channel. It made it in the newspaper! So you know the policy it self was a first it was controversial so obviously the policy was very controversial to journalists so we positioned in a way that certainly grabbed everybody
IB: People who do what you do are commonly called spin-doctors. How do you react when people call you that?
DM: I laugh, spin-doctor? No I don't consider myself a spin-doctor really you know the fact is that we are about communicating government policy. My job is to insure that Canadians understand and that they get the benefit what we are doing. I am a member of the government but at the end of the day it is about articulating. If we cannot got Canadians to A) learn about the policy and know about the policy then how at the end of the day are they going to measure our success as a government so we have to try to effectively communicate a policy to people so that at the end of our mandate they know that we have done something.
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