Communicating off the record

Introduction: The stigma of silence

Few terms like ‘off-the-record communication’ are so widely misunderstood. Democratic publics are suspicious of authorities who speak ‘under condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to speak’. It carries the aura of bad – at least questionable – ethical practice. In the Western media, the code word (Fish, 1994) of silence is largely negative. A content analysis of Google alerts has shown that collocations such as ‘shameful silence’ or ‘deafening silence’ dominate the English-speaking journalist idiom. The democratic role of journalism and, by default, public relations is seen in ‘increasing the visibility’ and ‘gaining a voice’ for the silent including against the ‘cover-ups’ and ‘silencing’ of power. ‘Braking silence’ is the most often used phrase in that regard. It has both a valiant and a news value. It not only suggests a heroic self-reference to dogged journalist investigation but also makes a sales pitch by advertising news that has not happened yet (Dimitrov, 2015).

Communication research, however, has unveiled a more complex relation between silence and power. Yes, power can silence, but silence can also empower. Feminist literature, for example, has early discovered and affirmed the properties of silence possessed by the ‘other gender’ (Clair, 1993; Malhotra and Rowe, 2013; Owens, 1985). In her prose, Virginia Woolf often returns to the resistance of stillness ‘disinterested in overpowering reality’ (Matar, 2014). Here is a snippet from her novel ‘To the lighthouse’:

It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. (Woolf, 2007: 232)

The stigma of silence also abides a professional self-interest in journalism. News-reporting requires that at least two sources confirm a fact. But unnamed sources are sources of sorts. A source validates a fact, but a name validates a source. Sometimes, the name is even more important that the fact. Sometimes, the name is the fact. Sometimes, the name is the last frontier of reality, to which one could reduce a fact. The name as ‘the last man standing’. There is nothing left beyond its index (Derrida, 1982). Only a name can do both: make news and prove it. An American editor explained the success of his local newspaper, ‘It’s because of three things: names, names and names’ (Heath and Heath, 2007: 44). Without a name, the public questions the reporter, not the source. The buck stops with the journalist, not the communicator.

But professional self-interest also leads to a tacit symbiosis in the communication industries. Reporters reinforce the stigma to pressure their sources, including PR practitioners, not to fall silent when they protect their clients. At the same time, journalists defend their own right to silence when it comes to protecting their own sources – which, again, may be politicians, public servants, business people or professional communicators. In other words, journalists and sources are clients to each other in either direction. They are more visible to each other than to their publics – at least more than they are ready to admit in public (Dimitrov, 2019).

Off-the-record briefings carry that stigma of silence. One is tempted to wonder why those who are recognised as authorities do not want to be recognised because they are not authorised to speak. One may suspect that they hide something by dodging public scrutiny. Not only journalists but also academics rush to put a label on this questionable practice – ethically and politically. They usually contrast it with the good one, the on-the-record communication, in a black–white split. In such simplistic juxtaposition, off-the-record briefings are, for example, covert and opaque, and on-the-record communication is overt and transparent (Gaber, 2000; Hobbs, 2015; Tiffen, 1999).

However, the practice of PR is more complex than that. Not all forms of covert communication are undemocratic – as not all forms of overt communication are democratic. A case of – overly! – overt and transparent and undemocratic communication are the President Trump’s denials and allegations. The inventor of verbose tweets, however, lacks the understanding of strategic silence. He does not know when to shut up and how to communicate through silence. In his Rose Garden or Airforce One talkfests with White House correspondents and ‘friendly’ interviews with ‘Fox and friends’, it often happens that what he says becomes the biggest obstacle to what he wants to do (Barbash and Hawkins, 2017; Parker et al., 2018; Thrush, 2016). When in February 2019, for an instance, he declared national emergency to fund his border wall, he again put his foot in the mouth virtually undercutting his legal case. He bragged, ‘I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster’. Which a civil rights lawyer instantly lauded on Twitter: ‘keep talking mr president’ (Zapotosky and Dawsey, 2019).

This essay first introduces the concept of semantic indirectness and its method. Then, it defines the mode of off the record and discusses some of its rules. A comparison between the strategies of on- and off-the-record types of communication follows. Then both categories are linked to the modes of strict and loose talk. The next section presents the concept of affinity as different from trust; an argument that revolves around affinity rather than trust and explains how off-the-record communication constructs a ‘fraternity of sorts’. The last chapter draws parallels between on the record and advertising and off the record and PR. It concludes with the assertion that modes of extreme indirect communication such as off-the-record briefings still define the core strategic advantages of PR in the promotional mix.

Indirectness as method

This essay is a spin-off of my long-term research of the use of strategic silence in PR (Dimitrov, 2018). PR literature recognises different approaches to strategic communication as the conceptional ‘how’ to intentional ‘what’ in public campaigns, which depends on both theoretical preferences and organisational goals (for many Bentele and Nothhaft, 2010; Coombs and Holladay, 2010; Hallahan et al., 2007; Halloran, 2007; Holtzhausen and Zerfass, 2013; Smith, 2013). In a lingering background of ethical, political, and legitimacy concerns, all main models of strategic communication focus on – and emphasise – the messaging, glass-half-full, write-in aspect of PR strategy.

What PR theory usually misses are two important aspects. First, it is its other, glass-half-empty, write-out aspect of noise reduction, which is especially relevant in the era of the social media. Communication practitioners testify that silence is often (more than) half of their daily activities (Davis, 2002). In PR, not creating positive publicity but avoiding negative publicity comes first (Dimitrov, 2019). And, second, practitioners richly use strategic silence either way – as non-communicative and communicative silence. This article discusses the second, communicative aspect of strategic silence and communicating off the record as one of its modes. What binds silence and strategy here is indirect communication. Strategy is more indirect than tactics. It utilises one thing for another. A good strategy is the whole, which is more that its parts. It is the silent, invisible gravity that holds those parts together. It looks evasively empty. As in the Lao Tzu’s poem:

A wheel is useful,

Because of the hole in the centre of the hub.

A clay pot is useful because it contains empty space.

Doors and windows are useful

because they are gaps in the walls.

The value of what is there

Lies in what is not there.

Silence is also an extreme form of indirect communication. It constitutes the chain of discontinuations, folds and transformations through which a message is mediated. Silence also facilitates reciprocity in communication – the listening of the speaker and speaking of the listener. In indirect conversation – telling and not selling, for example – the speaker steps back and the listener steps in by co-constructing the shared meaning and possibly taking ownership of its message.

A note about my method: in this essay, I argue that off-the-record communication as a form of strategic silence is neither good nor bad. There is no inherent ethical – or political, for that matter – quality in it. It could be both depending on the context of its uses. My definition is ontological, not normative. The ethical and political aspects are very important. However, an analysis should finish rather than start with them because they should follow from a deeper understanding of how communication functions.

For the definition of indirectness, I distinguish between mediation and mediatisation. My approach is semiotic rather than material. The media as physical resources (both as materials and instruments) is a vital aspect in the chain of production and distribution of discourses (Van Leeuwen and Kress, 2011). Mediatisation is the materialisation of indirect communication. However, here I am more interested in the semiotic aspect of indirectness, which involves various strategies of sense making. I feel especially indebted to some functional approaches to discourse analysis such as the systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1973, 1994), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992; Van Dijk, 1997; Wodak, 1996), pragmatics (Grice, 1975; Wodak, 2007), speech act theory (Austin, 1975; Searle, 1969), face-saving and politeness analysis (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1981, 2009) and social semiotics (Hodge and Kress, 1988; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1990, 2001).

There are significant differences between those approaches, and they are applicable in the field of PR to various degrees. For example, they are either linguistic-centred or multimodal (both PR relevant), either micro- or macro-focussed (latter is more import because PR works on and through whole discourses), closer either to texts or practices (PR produces texts to ultimately influence practice) and more or less multidisciplinary (context is key to text, but it is an eclectic, not a master key). What is common for them, is that they all regard communication as a mutual process of implying (by speakers) and inferring (by listeners). In that sense, all communication is mediated by the selective and creative use of semiotic resources (Fairclough, 2001; Van Leeuwen, 2005). It includes, for example, the strategic games – that everyone plays – of distinguishing between what is said and what is meant, between meaningful silence and pointless speaking, and between what constitutes a sensible talk and when flouting its rules could make even more sense (Attardo, 1993; Greenall, 2006). Those polyvalences, ambiguities, and mix-ups in sense making – in culture as process of semiosis – are not abnormal. They are functional. They facilitate the alignment of discourse, text and context, of communication, performance and action, and of signification, limitation and change (Butler, 2011; Fairclough, 2001; Leitch and Motion, 2010).

Meaningful silence can be theoretically but not empirically isolated. It is in dialectical, practical relation with non-silence. Talking and remaining silent, for example, are not only two opposite roles – as in turn-taking, when one speaks and the other listens. In practice, the said and unsaid usually work together and coincide. The said makes the unsaid meaningful. But the unsaid also makes the said meaningful. The places of both as figure and background are interchangeable. In one single utterance, people explicitly state and foreground one thing and implicitly omit and background another (many more things, actually). They may speak to remain silent and may say nothing to send a message. In The history of sexuality, Michel Foucault called it exhaustive representation – the transformation of silence from repression into discourse. The post-Victorians found a way of talking ‘institutionally’ and ‘scientifically’ about sexual desire in order to subjugate it (Foucault, 1990). They did no longer repress sexuality by coercive means but ‘rationalised’ it by verbose silence.

Off-the-record briefings constitute an inverse version of exhaustive representation. Instead of talking not to be heard – not talking to be heard. What is not supposed to be said speaks volumes. What one does not have to publish becomes common knowledge. What cannot be directly said as content indirectly becomes a pattern of interpretation. Invisibility makes it unavoidable. It is too far to be seen by the public. It is too close to be seen by the journalist. It is like putting glasses on; one does not see them – one sees through them. They begin to determine how one sees what one sees.

On and off the record

The difference between both modes of communication is not between saying and not saying. In either manner, sources do talk to reporters. To later clarify what one has said or not, it is often too little and too late. In the epoch of Facebook and Twitter, sharing information and keeping it secret at the same time is no longer possible (Greenslade, 2013). This is especially true when one wants to prevent something from publishing. As Michelle Schofield, Manager Corporate Communication and Communities NSW, puts it, ‘Golden rule is everything you say is on the record’ (Personal interview, 17 November 2011). One way or another, it will get out.

Off-the-record communication is not the opposite of on-the-record communication. It is still communication. Its goal is not preventing information from publishing. If one does not want it out, once does not say it – whether in or off the record. Both modes aim at getting an information published under certain – although different – conditions. What set both apart are the differences between the means, not the ends of communication.

There are strings attached to off-the-record briefings. But communicating on the record is not unconditional either. When it is attributable, reporters can quote and name the source (Tulloch, 1993; Somerville and Ramsey, 2012). What is often lost is that not only they can – they also must refer to it as adequately as possible once they decide to use it. Both the name and content of an information supplier are properties of its brand. Sources are very jealous in that regard.

On-the-record and attributable information puts responsibilities on the journalists, which are different from those imposed by the off-the-record briefings. Those obligations are not less stringent. It is still in the discretion of the editor to choose whether (and how) to report the new information. But reporters are limited in their freedom to frame what the source has told them. On the record compels them to reproduce both their own voice (interpretation) and the voices of others who have given statements (information). The linguistic terms we can use in this respect are transparency and opacity elisions (Quine, 2013). An opaque version reproduces what is true for the perceiver – in our case the voice of the attributed source. A transparent one reflects what is true for the observer – what is true for the journalist but not necessarily the source (Jayyusi, 2014). On the record requires that journalists do not become transparent – that they do not delete or omit the voices of others and entirely substitute them with their own version. To an extent, they curb their own transparency and preserve the opacity of others – the authenticity and balance of all manifest voices in a polyphone media text (Jalbert, 1994). Using reported speech and quotation marks, for example, reporters just let voices on record represent themselves.

Of course, the journalists remain the dominant definers even when information is on the record. They still may choose not only what to publish but also how to represent or misrepresent it. In either case – on and off the record – the ultimate control is not by the source. The difference, however, is that while off-the-record briefings rely entirely on the dissolving of the other in the interpretation of the reporter – that is, the transparency of the journalist fully deletes the opacity of the other voice – on-the-record communication, on the contrary, requires certain authenticity and self-representation of the other – that is, the opacity of the other is palpable and the transparency of the reporter is dialled down. It is a generic, impersonal difference – in the genre or reporting. All other conditions equal, and the communicator may have some backchannel control – if any – over the publishing of information given on the record but not of what is conveyed off the record.

On the record can also be unattributable. In the United Kingdom, the worlds-oldest proviso, the Chatham House Rule ¹ , stipulates,

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. (Chatham House, 2015)

The rule specifies the mode of unattributable on-the-record conversation. Similar are the ‘lobby terms’ for correspondents who have access to the Member’s Lobby in the British Parliament. The Lobby journalists are also invited to 10 Downing Street for briefings with the ministers and prime minister’s secretary on the same terms (BBC, 2008). The purpose of the non-attribution clause is to allow the participants to speak free and voice their own opinion even if it is not of the organisation, role or affiliation they formally represent.

Reported is what has been said but not who has said it. Sources speak ‘on condition of anonymity’ – usually without an explanation why. The answer goes without saying (Carlson, 2011). And it is still news; in fact, it is news with added value; a secret news. The obscurity of the revealing source imbues its information with the mystery of the forbidden fruit. It teases curiosity, raises attention. Willing to talk representatives hide their identity. What is the reason? Is it unofficial, perhaps personal? Perhaps the source is at odds with the organisation? Is it subverting it? Does it smell of scandal?

Usually, it does not. Unattributable and on-the-record information can just be a better choice than an official statement. An organisation influences its public without taking responsibility for that. Often such information is neither personal nor subversive but strategic. For example, an organisation is canvassing the potential acceptance of an already made but unannounced decision. It is checking reactions, cautioning expectations, setting anticipation or testing the message. Anonymous sources, ‘not authorised to speak on behalf the organisation’, may just be authorised to pass as unauthorised. And when unattributable grabs come from the top, their leakers are unauthorised only in a sense that they authorise themselves.

Power relations do matter. If unattributable information comes from the top of the organisation, it is more likely to be a ‘strategic leak’ (Safire, 1982; Zimmer, 2010). If it comes from the bottom – and if it is indeed unauthorised – then it may well be ‘subversive’ (Flynn, 2006) and even subject of persecution (Pincus, 2005). Whistleblowing is different. The leakers strip their anonymity. They stand up to the organisation in persona. Self-less leaking is subversive and attributable (Greenberg and Edwards, 2009).

Leaks, no doubt, pose ethical dilemmas to the PR practitioner. Here, it is not the place to expand on it. However, I would like to propose two considerations for further debate. First, it is questionable whether leaks are inherently a PR issue. It seems to me that communication professionals leak only when their bosses exclusively charge them with the task. But is it a wise move? PR practitioners are not good leakers. They are skilled at combining on the record and off the record because both communication strategies work with publics – either directly or indirectly through their influencers. Leaking is different. Ethical or not, it is illegitimate, sometimes criminal. It generates publicity, but it is not publicity work. It is highly unusual to be in the prerogatives of attributed sources such as professional communicators. It is a phenomenon of rugged powerplay. It is usually confined to the privileges of accredited sources – those who are legitimate enough to afford illegitimate moves – such as CEOs, ministers and politicians (Dimitrov, 2018: 223). Second, it seems to be an ethical issue for anyone else, but not for journalists. Has anyone ever heard of a media or reporter complaining that someone was leaking to them?

Off-the-record communication goes a step further than unattributable on-the-record information. It restricts both naming and quoting of the source. The journalist should remain silent about all new facts and personal views expressed by the source. Even the occurrence of the meeting should not be reported. Journalists are left with no choice but to use their imagination and figure other, unconventional ways of observing the ban but also benefitting from their temporal competitive advantage – to be privy to something new and possibly scoopy that no one else knows. As a difficult rhyme, this restriction sometimes spurs creative thinking and lateral inventions.

In 1996, the US President Bill Clinton and his former press secretary, Mike McCurry, set in place the practice of psych-background. Reporters were not allowed to record (‘on tape’), take notes on or directly attribute Clinton’s remarks. The next US presidents, except Trump, have keenly adopted it. Its tag has slightly changed to deep background. President Barak Obama had developed it as major communication tool. He regularly invited at the White House a small and personally picked elite group of journalists. The briefings, which he transformed into intense conversations, lasted up to 3 hours each and took place up to three times a month (Byers, 2013a).

There is still some confusion about the difference between deep background and off-the-record meetings. In 2013, a White House briefing on revelations about a sensitive Benghazi investigation was conducted on ‘deep background’, although the existence of the meeting was off the record. An incorrect reference to it as ‘off the record’ prompted the then White House spokesman Josh Ernest to explain the meaning of deep background. His definition has become sort of standard: ‘Deep background means that the info presented by the briefers can be used in reporting, but the briefers can’t be quoted’ (Byers, 2013b).

Off the record explained

As the resilience and longevity of the Chatham House rules have proven, off-the-record communication may be of benefit for both sources and reporter. However, if it is anything but spontaneous or accidental. If not carefully planned, it can easily get out of hand and spell (public relations) disaster. Explicit understanding and mutual agreement about its rules are prerequisites. Before communicators go off the record, they set specific rules for the meeting, which they should make clear to all parties.

To start with, ‘off the record’ literally means ‘not on tape’. In Australia, the former Liberal Premier of Victoria, Ted Baillieu, had an off-the-record conversation with the state political editor of the Sunday Age paper, Farrah Tomazin, in which he was frank and disparaging about colleagues from his own party and government. The editor secretly recorded his accusations and sent the audio to hundreds of Liberal MPs and party members from a bogus email. Eventually, the recorder came into the custody of the oppositional Labour party, whose operatives later claimed they had destroyed both record and device soon after (The Age, 2014). In the heated debate that followed, the editor in chief of The Age, Andrew Holden, defended the secret use of ‘on tape’ in the off-the-record interview as ‘a question of intent, in this case to ensure accuracy, just as taking shorthand notes without informing the source that you are doing that to achieve the same end’ (ABC, 2014).

However, from a PR perspective, this ‘small’ difference is critical. Confidential talk to journalists should not be captured on audio or video recording. Notes, including shorthand, are interpretations. A tape is a tangible, ‘material proof’. The no-tape and unattributed rules guard the speaker from documented slip-ups and gaffs. In the sped-up news cycle such recordings could inflict maximum damage when published as unscripted, self-harming and taken out-of-context howlers, which could then haunt the person for a long time. President Clinton, for example, experienced that firsthand when he dropped on the record that the country was on the ‘funk’. There is no coincidence that his slip of tongue occurred only months before he introduced the ‘psych background’ briefings (Byers, 2013a).

To have certainty when one goes off the record, one knows how to go to a certain type of media and a certain type of reporter. Ian Pope, Senior Corporate Communicator at Edelman, Australia says,

Tony Boyd at the Australian Financial Review writes the Chanticleer, the back page – the most read page in business. He’s somebody you can have off-the-record conversations with because he’s interested in relationships and building relationships with business. He is somebody who’s experienced at doing off-the-record briefings at the highest level. What you’re doing when you go to the Australian Financial Review, as you do sometimes with Dow Jones, [is] you give them stuff off the record with a view that it will make it into the newspaper. It’s just you are framing it in a way that it’s not attributed to you, and it’s just informing their story, providing a different perspective. So, yes, there’s a little bit of currency in off the record. It always goes on the record, but does it become attributable to a person or a company? Not if it’s properly off the record. [Personal interview, 18 February 2015]

Off-the-record communication presents a problem to the speaker. One cannot control the trajectory of information once it is given to a few. The British Conservative party co-chair, Lord Feldman, contended that he did not refer to party’s activists as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons’ when he passed by a journalist table in London’s InterContinental hotel. But someone heard it. Or he might have said it off the record, which he thought gave him the right to forget it. But journalists from different, competing media corroborated the phrase and that was it with the single off-the-record quote. His identity was leaked because, in the presence of 18 journalists, it was bound to happen (Greenslade, 2013).

The Uber executive, Emil Michael, suggested to a gathering of invited journalists, ‘The company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media – specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticised the company’. A BuzzFeed editor brought the story (Smith, 2014). The first reaction of Michael was to remind the journalists that the meeting had been off the record. The editor, Ben Smith, replied he had never agreed with this stipulation. Then Michael changed his heart and apologised. Then, to make it up with the press, his communication team promised a ‘kinder, gentler Uber’. They invited reporters to join them for drinks at a San Francisco bar. The invite explicitly stated, ‘The Event is Off-The-Record’ (Constine, 2015).

As there is no off the record on tape, off-the-record briefings are not efficient in the presence of many. Lord Feldman had underestimated the power of numbers. So did the former US Attorney General, Erich Holder, when in 2013 he invited top journalists to discuss the guidelines of the Department of Justice for dealing with investigations of possible security leaks. He asked them not only as reporters but also as affected by the Department’s intervention. The media were irritated not only at becoming the story themselves but also by the off-the-record request. Why should they be silent about their silencing? Some boycotted the meeting. Some did not but found a way to publish its talking points. Holder was ‘naïve’ to organise a de facto press conference:

Alex Jones, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter: If you are going to invite every news organisation in Washington and tell them it’s off the record, I think you are kidding yourself … This was an off-the-record press conference. Who ever heard of an off-the-record press conference? There was too much interest in it to stay off the record.

Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute: There is a gravitational law … The more people who are in the room, the less valuable the briefing will be. (Shister, 2013)

Which reflects the next rule: like a tape, numbers verify. It takes the validation by two or more to overrule the ban on the shared information. And another one: communicate off the record with mediators who are influencers, but who do not have special interest in the topic. Off the record is not inside trading. It rather presents a modern form of secular confession. But there is no role for a messiah here. It is not worth trying to simulate it – as the examples with the Uber executive and US Attorney General have shown.

And one more rule: if you go global, you need an intensive course in off-the-record communication. An unintended consequence of globalisation is that international companies have difficulty catching up with the local news. The social media cannot cancel the time zones on the planet. To fill the gap between a potentially significant local event and the official position of the headquarters, branches of global firms are increasingly turning to off-the-record briefings. Today, improved communication culture also gives businesses more confidence in using various degrees of strategic silence. Matthew Gain, General Manager of Edelman in Sydney, explains,

We’re seeing global alignment across media. Something that’s news in Australia for a global brand that can – will – make news in in the US, Germany or any other market. We’re seeing a global market. Things are speeding up, things don’t just happen within national borders now. What that means is that global companies, when faced with something that might originate from Australia, concerned that this could become a global issue, can’t make a decision at a local level around how best to respond, because it needs to go to global to get the official statement that will work – because this has got global potential, global PR wants to know about it. The one thing that hasn’t changed is we still work in a world that rotates every 24 hours, and so the news might break here in Australia in business hours, but the global PR manager is asleep. You have a gap of five, six, seven hours before the company representative is allowed to give any official response. What I’m starting to see now is our clients are doing off-the-record briefings to journalists to give them at least some background on the item. They’re not allowed to provide an official comment, and increasingly they recourse to off-the-record briefings. [Personal interview, 18 February 2015]

The off-the-record mode protects all participants in a meeting, not only the host. This is not always clear to everyone in the room. During the conversation, reporters offer critical comment and bluntly argue in a way they also would not like to be published. An executive, for example, chases up the feedback of his external critics, which is often more useful than of his subordinate managers.

For the off-the-record meeting in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, US President Barak Obama invited not only his regular favourites ² but also conservative reporters and respected opponents such as the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer and Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot.

Here is a glimpse of what was going on behind closed doors:

For that reason, calling these sessions ‘off-the-record meetings’ is actually inaccurate, said Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, who held similar meetings. ‘It’s a misnomer. After these meetings journalists will go on the air and say, ‘Here’s what the White House is thinking on this’’, Fleischer explained. ‘It’s smart. Every White House should do it’.

‘It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging those people’, said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings. ‘He reads people carefully – he has a columnist mentality – and he wants to win columnists over’, said another.

‘The facts are off-the-record, but the sentiment is not’, Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent, said of the meetings. ‘When you know how the president thinks about something, when you understand the point of view, how do you avoid talking about it?’ Todd said. ‘It’s in your head’. (Byers, 2013a)

Combined with other strategies and applied systematically, off-the-record conversation helps shaping the sentiment – or tone or tenor – of the current discourse. ‘It’s in your head’ works at different levels. A reporter may disagree with the source. His professional instinct, however, will prompt him to adequately reproduce those thoughts as facts in their own right – the facts of how the source is thinking about the reality, not of the reality per se. I will expand on this one of the next sections.

In that regard, Obama’s selection of reporters was diverse but also rigorous to the extreme. ‘Both reporters and journalists believe he prefers talking to people who are thinking about – and willing to be influenced on – grand concepts, rather than those who might pepper him with questions day-to-day events and processes’ (Byers, 2013a).

Strict and loose talk

Off-the-record briefings are not a lesser – sparser, guarded of paranoid – form of communication. It is just more indirect and, in that sense, silent – with all limitations but also freedoms. In the same vein, it is not more censored, spun or undemocratic than on-the-record communication. On the contrary, off the record represents a central, indispensable and in-depth working communication strategy.

No comment is not off the record. It is a refusal – a declared imposition – to talk. Stiff lips talking. It is not silence either. It is speaking about silence – not when silence speaks. ‘No comment’ is already a comment. It goes on the record.

Here, it is also the place to distinguish between public strategic silences used by PR and other more institutional or cultural or personal silences, which may be confused with the former. They are institutional rules of subordination, which administer who should speak and who not and in what circumstances. There are also cultural rituals of respect and deference, which include norms of who should speak to whom and who not. Finally, there are techniques of politeness – of successful layperson practises – that people learn, employ and adjust to achieve results by saving the face of others – with rather pedagogical and humanitarian intentions (Ephratt, 2008; Sifianou, 1993; Tannen, 1985). In all those cases, silence may be used as an extreme tool of indirect communication. However, it is not strategic silence in a PR sense.

In litigation PR, for example, the problem of intentional silence carries the strain between strict talk, codified in law, and loose talk, the language of PR. ‘No comment’ sticks with the strict talk. It is the verbal vow of firm, non-communicative silence. Off-the-record communication, on the contrary, imposes rigorous external limits to allow looser internal talk.

Both strict and loose talk may serve the rights of the client. The property of rights includes not only the legal ones before court but also those in the court of public opinion (Watson, 2002). Yet, there is still a permanent struggle between the representatives – of the clients’ interests in the courts, the lawyers, and in the court of public opinion, the communicators. In terms of strategy, it is about the dilemma of whether to use strict talk or loose talk. Respectively, it is also about the choice between the broad, direct and less informative ‘No comment’ and the selective, indirect and more talkative off-the-record briefing.

Which kind of talk to choose hinges not only on the problem and publics but also on the power relations between the legal and PR departments inside an organisation. In the modern organisation, top lawyers rather than communicators belong to the dominant coalition in an organisation – the informal circle that wields the real power in internal decision-making (Berger, 2005). In the post-modern, network-flattened and relatively loose type of organisation, communicators get more influence over policy making and corporate relations. Open entities with blurred borders between organisation and environment not only communicate policy; communication becomes policy there (Holtzhausen, 2002, 2014; Mumby, 1997). Changes in internal power relations coincide with discursive changes – alterations in the relations between strict talk and loose talk. And there are sectors in the economy and society, where the character of the industry has stronger gravity than the power relations between internal departments or the degree of the post-modernisation of an organisation.

LJ Loch, co-founder and director of Republic, a reputation positioning consultancy in Sydney, which daily deals with litigation cases, says,

We would never use off the record. Anything that happened in terms of pre-litigation briefings and context around the journalists who are likely to be covering the story would be material that was consistent with that that was being presented in court … Sometimes it can be will against will. It’s about holding your ground if you believe that it’s in your client’s interests to limit the response by not providing a response at that particular time. That can be for a whole range of reasons. That can be because it’s material and needs to be disclosed to the stock exchange first. It might be the subject of litigation. It might be commercially sensitive. That is where the person that is being interviewed has to have enough confidence in their own story and their own ability to say, ‘That’s not the real issue here, the real issue is this’, and change the conversation. [Personal Interview, 4 December 2016]

Comment is content. Not commenting does not need an explanation when its goal is not to give contact but to keep the contact. In that sense ‘No comment’ is phatic; it just maintains the channel. If the contact, however, is also an important relation, an additional clarification about why the organisation cannot provide the information is useful. Such explanation may not provide much new information either. The off-the-record strategy starts with volunteering this confidential explanation. It may also stop here (explanation but no story) or go one step further and offer an alternative content (explanation and new story).

Trust and affinity

But why do people give off-the-record interviews at all? What could they say differently or better than in the usual, on-the-record way? Scott Crebbin, PR consultant in the Sydney Area, shares his take of the strategy:

It just gives you the ability to give the full information. Some journalists appreciate that stuff. It gets back to trust, you know. And it could be, ‘I can’t give you comment on that and I have good reason not to give you comment on that’. And off the record you can say, ‘this is the reason why …’. That’s so much about trust … And sometimes they can give it back to you as well … I also think it’s not just about the relationship. It’s about whatever they are doing. If they’re writing a story about such and such and you’re just giving them not a hell of a lot of information you could tell them the reasons [for that] and it can nullify the story. Or, they can ring you about something that they’ve heard, and you can nullify the story by giving them the off-the-record story about it by saying, ‘look you’re actually going the wrong way with this. Actually, you’ve been given a bit of a bum steer. Off the record, this is actually what’s going on’. On the record / off the record is bread and butter stuff. [Personal Interview, 24 February 2012]

The relevance theory, which Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber (1988a: 30) have developed, suggests two types of intent in overt communication – that is, in conversation that involves mutual manifestedness. The (1) informational intent aims at changing the communicative environment of the listener – the set of facts manifest to him. Here, we acknowledge that a speaker is telling us (his) facts. The (2) communicative intention is to make the listener recognise the informational intent and change his thoughts and actions. Here, he appreciates that the speaker ‘tells it as it is’. The first intent pursues cognitive cooperation, including ‘truth recognition’. The second asks for social cooperation, including ‘trust building’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1986).

The second kind of cooperation enables the first. But the first does not necessarily lead to the second. Trust is good, but it does not explain good source – reporter relations, including off-the-record interactions. In the principle of relevance, Wilson and Sperber posit that trust should not be an essential condition for the intent to inform. For example, a reporter does need to believe in what the politician says. It suffices that he is able to adequately reflect it. His report is relevant when it is faithful to what the politician has said. Informational relevance reflects the fact of the said, not whether the said reflects facts. In that sense, a representation is adequate when an utterance resembles another one close enough in a relevant way (Wilson and Sperber, 1988b). It must be faithful to the thoughts expressed (its interpretative resemblance), not to the real state of affairs (its descriptive use). ‘It does not have to be true to be appropriate’ (Tanaka, 1994: 18). Or, in terms of transparency and opacity elisions, it does not have to be true to the reporter’s voice (transparency) to be appropriate for the reported voice (opacity).

Informational relevance is possible without communicative relevance. Faithfull reporting is thinkable without trust between media and source. Thus, the link between trust and off-the-record communication is rather technical. Politicians must trust reporters that they would not go on the record. ‘I trust you’, they say, and this expression indirectly conveys a plea or an order or anything but the literal meaning of trust. The rationale for the selection of those to be briefed is not to pick those who agree with us, and we can trust them in forming a cabal. It is rather to choose those who are the best experts and opinion leaders – even when they hold inconvenient and opposite views.

Trust measures closeness as social relation between people. It goes beyond the utilitarian immediacy of opportunist politeness. Trust is an interpersonal relation based on mutual values and verified by experience. It is also strategic because indirect. One cannot become trusted by asking for trust. Peter Lazar, President of Professional Public Relations Asia-Pacific, shares,

It’s such a surprise to a journalist that you want to talk to them and get to know them because you’ve got clients in the health area and they’re a medical roundsman or roundswoman and you want to get to know them, not because my client has got a new product coming out Tuesday but because I’m going to need to know this roundsman for this client and for 10 others and if you can make that kind of relationship and they begin to trust you and you can then get on the record and off the record with that person and particularly in health because in health the journalists tend to be much more careful than say in horse racing since that was in the news this week. (Personal Interview, 5 May 2015)

In off-the-record communication, however, affinity has priority to trust. Affinity measures their closeness in relation to an object. Affinity does not exclude trust. It just asks in addition, ‘Trust in relation to what’? And the answer is, ‘in relation to an object’. In other words, one can visualise trust as a relation between two people, A and B. Affinity uses that segment as a side in a triangle, where the angle opposite to that side is the object C. The trust side, AB, is inter-subjective. The AC and BC sides delineate subject–object relations. Affinity measures the whole triangle ABC – the closeness between subjects in relation to an object. Trust is inter-personal. Affinity is institutional-professional.

The main function of PR is not informing but influencing through informing (Berger and Reber, 2006; Coombs and Holladay, 2010; Turk, 1985). An off-the-record meeting assembles a discursive community, not a circle of confidants. Affinity is at the core of PR because it reflects the closeness between influencers. In contrast to mass marketing and advertising, where reach measures the number of people directly exposed to a message, PR uses affinity to gouge the way of indirect targeting of publics through the mediation of influencers. Using social media analytics, for example, communicators can learn who the followers are and who the following of whom. Then a custom-tailored and cost-effective way works the public through affinity rather than through reach – through influencing the influencers whose fellowship constitutes the public one ultimately targets (Fine, 2005; Maggi, 2009).

The problem with on-the-record communication is that it can get cluttered. Because the message is directly conveyed to distant (lay-)people, it is often overloaded with context details and, at the same time, spreads thin. Everyone gets something from it but no one much of it. In contrast, off-the-record information caters not for the public at large but for selected mediators – not for all reporters and not for all media. It involves only top influencers. Based on affinity, closed and close conversation between influencers is for advanced learners. Its language is highly specialised, more analytical and professional, and teasing the edges of expertise. No converser is there by chance. Everyone has reputation to guard. An off-the-record briefing clears ground for both respect and candour. ‘With all due respect …’, it is more of a sparing rather than communion.

The knowledge of influencers is vast but also mutual. They do not need to repeat it. In conversation behind closed doors, they do not have patience for small talk or pomp and circumstance. As invested in the same knowledge, they can understand one another in half word, even without words. This allows them to be economical on context and detail. They go straight to the expansion of what they know – the very purpose of getting together. They enjoy the luxury of informed silence. For the record, however, they spell out to others almost everything they do not talk about off the record. Their silence off the record is larger than what they put on the record. This is the paradox of the off-the-record conversation: people talk about things on which they will be silent; but, they are also silent on things about which they will be talking.

Conclusion: From wholesale to retail?

On the record has exchange value; off the record has use value.

There is no coincidence that Obama’s White House staff, Westminster’s ministers and the company’s managers and consultants also attend such briefings. The talk is off the record for journalists, but on the record for the rest. Openness and affinity equalise in this exclusive, inverted mode of publicity. Unequal, including hierarchical roles level as horizontal relations – that is, PR. In such meetings, organisations sometimes learn more about themselves than reporters do.

Off the record, everyone has willingly participated in the crystallisation of a unified message, which in its simple, striking and ready-to-go form becomes news to both journalists and staff. Then the problem for journalists is how to break it externally without saying it, whereas the problem for organisations is how to absorb it internally without failing to hear it.

Off-the-record briefings are neither less professional nor less ethical than any other form of source-media relations. This approach is only the most indirect strategy of being polite and political, that is, of influencing others without imposing on them (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Sifianou, 1993; Tanaka, 1994). This is especially true when influencing the influencers. One should treat them as people, not as media (Freberg et al., 2011; Kietzmann et al., 2011). As Chuck Todd has said, ‘The facts are off-the-record, but the sentiment is not’.

Both modes – on and off the record – are not politically neutral. Both reproduce inequalities of power. The phenomenon of President Trump’s prolific tweets is a striking example of on-the-record communication that skirts the mediation of pundits and mainstream media in direct contact with his power base. In comparison, President Obama based his regular off-the-record briefings on the belief that he can change the public opinion rather indirectly by informed, candid and cultured – thus sometimes out of the sight and noise of the voters – discussion with a hand-picked selection of top leaders (‘When they go low, we go high’). Trump’s on-the-record communication follows an anti-elitist and authoritarian concept of the public sphere as (his) one-person-guided and triggered – twitted – direct political pressure by active, disenchanted and angry constituencies (‘What do you have to lose?’). Obama’s off-the-record meetings reflect the elitist and liberal-representative model of the bourgeoise publicity, in which rational discussion essentially takes place through the mediation of relatively few, educated and representative of the system influencers (Ferree et al., 2002). Each implies a fraternity of sorts – a bind of populist nationalism or democratic elitism (Mounk, 2018).

That ‘fraternity of sorts’ has both a professional and communal projections. At every Chatham House meeting, the Chair would draw to everyone’s attention the ‘Chatham House Rules’. As mentioned above, a constant reminder of the privilege and special obligations it carries is never too much and too soon. It is professional – how unattributed information should be handled – but also communal – the ritual of creation of a modern type of cabal that bonds people of various vocations and views. ³

In on-the-record interviews, one controls the message but due to the obvious self-interest of the source – attributable or unattributable – its credibility is low. In off-the-record conversation, one cannot control the message, but other and more credible influencers may take ownership of it and increase its impact (Ries and Ries, 2002).

On the record is advertising; off the record is PR.

In the off-the-record briefing, there is an increased degree of indirectness – an additional layering of silence and invisibility. As extremely indirect strategy, it drives PR even further away from advertising. The marketing and advertising industries, however, are watching this strategic advantage of PR and trying – not without success – to catch up.

For a long time, the relations between PR and media had been of, economically speaking, wholesale and retail. Information is like bread. The wholesaler supplies the ingrediencies such as yeast, flour, and liquids; the baker mixes, bakes and sells the bread. The communicator is a wholesaler who produces and supplies the information; the media is the retailer who selectively reworks and sells it. As wholesaler, the communicator does not have direct contact with publics. As retailers, the media are the mediators. In other words, the market-based relations between wholesaler and retailer define what is perceived as publicity. Those relations filter (twice) the information that the communicators initially send and it finally reaches the public via the media.

Today, the so-called content providers – the entities that fuse digital production and distribution such as Google, Amazon and Netflix – emerge as new mediators between businesses and media. They outsource both journalists who are unmatched in blending sales promotion with editorial policy and PR people who best know how to perform selling as telling. Through content marketing, native advertising and brand journalism, marketing and advertising are encroaching on PR, taking over its precious monopoly – publicity, strategic communication (Hallahan, 2014). Content is not any loner a wholesale ingredient. It can already be produced entirely outside the media. The media have increasingly become empty shells – publishing platforms and mailboxes. In the past, they were paying to publish. Today, they are paid to publish. Some reversal it is.

Out of the many tactics, one that stands out in content writing – from press releases and fact-checkers to infomercials and advertorials – is offering quality content that the media cannot refuse. It is about producing passages of text, which will go published without any alteration due to their almost perfect match with the editorial policy of the media and marketing merits that would increase circulation and traffic. In this case, the difference between wholesale and retail starts to disappear. Content bought wholesale is then resold almost unchanged – to a good profit margin. Journalist writing and editing are gradually reduced to posting rather than creating, stitching rather than waving, reproducing rather than producing (Dimitrov, 2014).

By shifting from wholesale to retail communication, PR writers are taking back some control over the final media product. In that respect, on-the-record communication has broadened and straightened its impact. Since direct sell is disguised as uninterested added value for the reader, on-the-record information addresses not so much the mediator – the expert, gatekeeper and influencer who the reporter may well be – but rather the consumer as audience at large.

In this new situation, the PR practitioners are pushed to abandon their strategic role of wholesale – that is, of grand design – distributors and act as retail – that is of direct sale – agents. The difference, again, is between telling and selling. Or it is, in another paradigm, between ‘pyro marketing’ (through lighting the passion of selected value-driven influencers) and mass marketing (by sending on record and one-size-fits-all messages) (Fine, 2005). Grand design positioning subtly influences values, norms and dispositions. Retail communication does not preach to the already converted; it only prompts them to follow their faith and do (buy) something. Retail communication is a noisy battle. Grand design positioning is fought in silence.

Analysing off-the-record communication, one may possibly add some fresh arguments in an evolving debate. Marketing, advertising and PR are in an increased tangle of integration and disfunction. The overlap between newly introduced brand newsrooms and established PR departments in some organisations is an example of that (Moses, 2014). The bigger question, however, are: if PR can no longer be a wholesaler, should it become a retailer? Should it pitch to its audiences direct? Should it become more marketing and advertising in times when they strive to become more PR? Should it trade off its strategic advantage for some tactical ones?

As a mode of strategic silence, off the record offers a good case of indirect, meaningful and listener-centred communication. Such development can enrich PR research in two aspects – a critical (negative) and a formative (positive) ones. The critical one starts from self-critic of the discipline. Why does PR not articulate its own silences? Critical research can make audible its own silences and the silences of others. How do people act not by not talking? Who administers the unsaid? On behalf of whom? And what are its effects? Acts of Švejkaesc silence such as absence, camouflage, disobedience, subversion, indifference, insolence, foot-dragging and deadpan may still be under-rated from a highbrow intellectual perspective, but history has vindicated them as formidable weapons of the week, poor and unequal (Baudrillard, 1984; De Certau, 1984; Scott, 2008).

The positive aspect reflects the need of opening the treasure trove of strategic and tactical silences, including those off the record communication, which can inform the work of professional communicators in a more reflective and structured way. Not that they do not practice it every day, but they are doing it in a functional, as-a-matter-of-fact way – as we do many things because we have to; but we do not talk about them because this it is not appropriate. All wisdom is already there, in the practice of PR, but we need an open forum to deliberate and articulate the accumulated silences – to gain more insight into that intangible, impermeable fullness of professional experience. It is similar to how the radio reporter collected tape cuts with silences in Heinrich Böll’s (1966) satire ‘Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen’.

But above all, PR practice is rich in normal, non-heroic and mainstream modes of indirect and still communication. Moving from the particular to the general – from off-the-record communication to strategic silence – one can obtain a key of understanding and researching other modes of silence – from strategic ambiguity, apophatic, explicit and implicit silence to noise-curation, non-issue-framing and grand communication design (Dimitrov, 2018). In the epoch of increasing inequality when both hegemonic rivals of neoliberal globalism and populist nationalism fail their constituencies (Elmer, 2007; Fitch and L’Etang, 2017; Miller and Dinan, 2008; Moloney, 2002), there is a growing number of stakeholders who need the help of PR with such invisible – and invincible – strategies of resistance, survival, meditation, affirmation and rebound.