A child drowned at a waterpark. That’s devastating. What the general manager said next made it much, much worse.
‘No comment.’
He said it three times in a single press scrum. Reporters were asking about supervision, about lifeguards, about where the parents were. He didn’t have answers yet. So he gave them nothing.
By the end of the day, the narrative wasn’t about what happened. It was about what he must be covering up.
He wasn’t covering up anything. He just didn’t know what to say. But here’s the problem: when a leader says ‘no comment,’ everyone hears the same thing. ‘I’m hiding something.’
‘On the advice of counsel, we’re not going to comment further’ isn’t much better. It doesn’t matter if you’re genuinely waiting for legal sign-off. It doesn’t matter if you truly don’t have the facts yet. The audience has already written the story, and you just handed them a villain.
Here’s what he could have said instead: ‘I don’t have all the information yet. Here’s what I can tell you. We’re taking this with complete seriousness. I’ll be back with more as soon as I have it.’
That’s not spin. It’s not a promise you can’t keep. It’s just presence — honest, human acknowledgment that something terrible happened and you’re not running from it.
The world is always looking for a villain in a crisis. ‘No comment’ doesn’t protect you from that role. It hands it to you. ‘No comment’ is a vacuum. Vacuums get filled by people who don’t have your best interests in mind.
If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. And you won’t like their version.