Silence is (sometimes) golden
Caught off guard With his Mörgeli replica, Kaspar Villiger has turned a non-event into a communicative own goal. Because "qui s'excuse, s'accuse" - in this case completely unnecessarily.
Column With his Mörgeli replica, Kaspar Villiger has turned a non-event into a communicative own goal. Because "qui s'excuse, s'accuse" - in this case completely unnecessarily - active communication is generally the key to success. This can even be proven empirically, as a complex analysis of Wall Street firms by Harvard Business School showed a few years ago, but like every rule, there are exceptions. This was recently illustrated by former Federal Councillor Kaspar Villiger. Vilified by Christoph Mörgeli in his usual defamatory manner because of his involvement in Swiss at the time and his board mandate at Néstlé, Villiger did what he should never have done: He reacted! Advised by whomever, the former finance minister even convened a special
media conference. There he justified himself against Mörgeli's accusations, which until then had only been acknowledged by a few insiders.
In the globally networked online world, it is true that false statements that could damage the image and/or bottom line cannot be left unchallenged. Otherwise they will end up in some archive - for example the Swiss Media Database (SMD) - where they will subsequently serve as a "credible source" for other articles (without ever having been checked for accuracy by the journalists). Corrections of misinformation therefore also serve to protect against the multiplication of falsehoods.
However, before taking such a step, one should check how credible the source of the misinformation is and how great its potential for damage is. In the case of Mörgeli, Villiger either failed to do this or he misjudged the situation. Because outside his own party and the Bernese political class (which lives in a false reality anyway), the infamous Zurich SVP National Councillor is only taken seriously by Weltwoche at best. In a desperate struggle to retain its dwindling readership, Weltwoche hired him as a columnist - true to the no longer quite Socratic motto: "I provoke, therefore I am!
Nationally, or at least regionally, Mörgeli had only achieved fame once before the Villiger intermezzo. At the beginning of 2004, when he embarrassed himself in the SF DRS "Rundschau" program because he - the great private sector expert - didn't even know how much the Museum of Medical History, which he heads, was costing the taxpayers of the canton of Zurich.
Thanks to Villiger's reply to his accusations, Mörgeli not only gained national attention, but also a new kind of credibility. True to the popular saying "Qui s'excuse, s'accuse", observers began to ask themselves why Villiger reacted so sharply to Mörgeli's polemic if there was nothing to it. The perception suddenly changed as to who was the perpetrator (namely the unspeakable Mörgeli) and who was the victim (the previously blameless Villiger).
Villiger's communication error consisted of making a mountain out of a molehill. There is no question that his counter-attack on Mörgeli took him into the gutter, from which he had stayed away during his entire political career and where he still does not belong today, and damaged his own image.
The universally respected former Federal Councillor would therefore have done better to stick to a Roman saying: "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses - if you had remained silent, you would have remained a philosopher." Or as the Arab philosophers recommended a few centuries later: "The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on."
Sacha Wigdorovits is head of the Zurich-based communications agency Contract Media.
media conference. There he justified himself against Mörgeli's accusations, which until then had only been acknowledged by a few insiders.
In the globally networked online world, it is true that false statements that could damage the image and/or bottom line cannot be left unchallenged. Otherwise they will end up in some archive - for example the Swiss Media Database (SMD) - where they will subsequently serve as a "credible source" for other articles (without ever having been checked for accuracy by the journalists). Corrections of misinformation therefore also serve to protect against the multiplication of falsehoods.
However, before taking such a step, one should check how credible the source of the misinformation is and how great its potential for damage is. In the case of Mörgeli, Villiger either failed to do this or he misjudged the situation. Because outside his own party and the Bernese political class (which lives in a false reality anyway), the infamous Zurich SVP National Councillor is only taken seriously by Weltwoche at best. In a desperate struggle to retain its dwindling readership, Weltwoche hired him as a columnist - true to the no longer quite Socratic motto: "I provoke, therefore I am!
Nationally, or at least regionally, Mörgeli had only achieved fame once before the Villiger intermezzo. At the beginning of 2004, when he embarrassed himself in the SF DRS "Rundschau" program because he - the great private sector expert - didn't even know how much the Museum of Medical History, which he heads, was costing the taxpayers of the canton of Zurich.
Thanks to Villiger's reply to his accusations, Mörgeli not only gained national attention, but also a new kind of credibility. True to the popular saying "Qui s'excuse, s'accuse", observers began to ask themselves why Villiger reacted so sharply to Mörgeli's polemic if there was nothing to it. The perception suddenly changed as to who was the perpetrator (namely the unspeakable Mörgeli) and who was the victim (the previously blameless Villiger).
Villiger's communication error consisted of making a mountain out of a molehill. There is no question that his counter-attack on Mörgeli took him into the gutter, from which he had stayed away during his entire political career and where he still does not belong today, and damaged his own image.
The universally respected former Federal Councillor would therefore have done better to stick to a Roman saying: "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses - if you had remained silent, you would have remained a philosopher." Or as the Arab philosophers recommended a few centuries later: "The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on."
Sacha Wigdorovits is head of the Zurich-based communications agency Contract Media.
