Dan Gillmor's PR Week editorial, "They Take it Seriously? Oh, Sure" centers on a nice little linguistic observation: when a PR head says, "We take ______ very seriously," they mean "We don't care at all about ________."
Privacy violations, a drumbeat these days, constantly get this treatment. On December 15, the AP reported charges against a New Hampshire teenager who allegedly stole credit-card numbers from McDonald's customers, with this quote from the company: "We take these matters very seriously…"
On December 14, after it was revealed that patients' medical data went missing from a data-management company in Ohio, the healthcare provider's spokesman intoned, "(W)e take this sort of thing very seriously," according to a Pennsylvania TV station.
Taking things seriously isn't limited to privacy slip-ups. A Texas district attorney, reacting to a Dallas newspaper's successful campaign to unseal Catholic Church documents about alleged sexual-abuse cover-ups, said, "We take these kinds of abuse scenarios very seriously" (The Dallas Morning News, December 15).
Update: For more, see the punchline to yesterday's Penny Arcade strip — Thanks, Jamie!
