The silence is thunderous

Words are remarkable. They can help, heal, hinder, hurt, harm, or humiliate, depending on how they are used. A single word can also have many implied meanings, a situation that gave rise to some of the finest works of comedy and which causes serious disputes and misunderstandings occasionally.

Take, for instance, the Arabic word msakham (plural msakhamin). Literally, it means grimy, but figuratively it indicates destitute, degraded, or dishonoured. This word cropped up in an exchange in Parliament over the removal of price subsidies. One deputy asked the prime minister: “What about the Jordanian msakhamin?”, to which the PM was misquoted as saying: “There are no poor Jordanians.” 

In fact, the PM said: “There are no msakhamin in Jordan, all Jordanians have dignity.” Clearly, he took the word to mean downtrodden instead of destitute. 

It would be difficult to accept that the journalists who reported the exchange acted in goodwill when they dropped the second part of the PM’s response. This was clearly a deliberate effort to make the PM and the government look insensitive to the fate of Jordanians. 

Having said that, one fundamental rule of communication is that the responsibility is on the messenger to ensure that his message is reported accurately. For instance, if the statement had been prepared and said: “All Jordanians have dignity and it is not proper to refer to them as msakhamin,” there would have been less room for misquotation. This is the work of media advisors. 

A speaker cannot control the motives of his audience or the media, and if he attempts to control what they report through coercion, it would be to the detriment of his credibility, as we see with official statements of all countries that do not respect freedom of expression. The only thing that a speaker can control is the information he gives, which is why good speakers rarely improvise, and they do not allow themselves to be provoked. 

But this incident also raises a serious question: why was the public so readily receptive to this misinformation? 

To be sure, Jordan is going through economic hard times, as evidenced by the number of shops that are closing or that stand unrented on any of the main commercial streets in Amman.  But economic hardship is nothing new. What is new is the total dejection, hopelessness and gloom that hang over Amman like a heavy raincloud. 

Public anger would be less menacing because an angry person expresses his complaint, volubly perhaps, but this can still be the start of a dialogue that resolves the dispute. Despair is more dangerous because it means that he has given up.

The Jordanian public expressed this grim pessimism by believing the misinformation fed to them without attempting to ascertain the truth, which would not have been hard. 

This means that the government seriously needs to exercise another aspect of communication: to listen well, particularly to listen to what is not said. This is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.

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