DailyPost 2330
A POLITICAL COMMUNICATOR’S DILEMMA
Who is a communicator has not been defined so far. It has been used, misused, disused in a variety of way, but the irony is that the standard role model it itself missing. When the persona of communicator remains undefined, how can attributes be correctly detailed and accepted across board, in a generic manner. From a rabble rouser to a run of the mill teacher is supposed to be good communicator. The profession which has a mandate to talk every day, in every class, very rarely throws up excellent communicators in the public domain.
Communication as a skill and expertise does not find any special attention in our academic curriculum and in daily life. If you able to hold on to the mike, without stage fear, and work through your agenda, you are declared to be a good communicator. Different from the teaching fraternity, we have the political class, whose only visible job which the country can make out, is to keep talking. Unfortunately, talking has been transformed into communication, and most of them practice in the same style. The most fascinating fact about this breed of communicators is that they can talk of everything. Might be it is conversely true as well.
Groomed in the mostly harsh rural political environment, with pitched battles and intense rivalries, to hold the fort is itself communication. Cajoling everyone to follow him and vote for him in the lowest level elections is communication for him. This is how the political communicator is born. He picks up his language, gestures and content literally off the soil. Content has never been his forte, and will never be. Simply, earthly and biased happens to be his communication style. As he graduates into higher political positioning, only this modality of communication cannot deliver to match his enhanced needs. This is where the political communicator’s dilemma starts.
What, when and where to say and more so when there are cameras over you all the time and video becoming the main mode of communication, we see verbal spillages, all around the public domain. He also has to follow the political party lines, otherwise he ceases to exist. Given their knowledge, content, language, style and being verbose all the time, there are many a slip between the cup and the lip. This is termed as their personal remarks, when caught on the wrong foot. Most of them have to fulfil their own agenda and to appeal to their constituents. At the end of the day, getting votes is all that counts for them. If you change your party, you are supposed to jump off the political cliff successfully, communicating. While on TV shows you have to project as an intellectual or at least knowledgeable and at the next moment you have to get into a dog fight. Lying endlessly sometimes becomes their main communication tool. How to make it happen it happen could be a challenge to even the best of the communicators but the political communicators do with elan? Speaking what you want to say and not what you are asked for or what is required is their core communication / survival trait.
WITH ENDLESS DILEMMAS WHAT CAN A POLITICAL COMMUNICATOR COMMUNICATE?
Sanjay Sahay