Outrage Culture Has Ruined the Apology

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Ahem:

In The Apology Impulse, co-author Sean O’Meara, a professional apologizer and public relations professional, argues that the corporate world has ruined the sanctity of the apology by failing to say sorry and over-apologizing. The book, which was published on October 29, examines the most egregious and effective business apologies in recent memory, from United Airlines’ passenger-dragging debacle in 2017 (and its failure to properly apologize) to Johnson & Johnson’s calm handling of a Tylenol recall in 1982.

Allow me to disagree. But first: a professional apologizer? How does one become a professional apologizer?

And now for my disagreement. I don’t think it’s corporations that have ruined the apology. It’s the rest of us. There is virtually no apology that is widely accepted anymore. No matter how sincere or real, half of us will call it a non-apology apology; half of us will insist the company still doesn’t get it; half of us will say the apology is useless because that particular bell can’t be unrung; and half of us will be pissed off that an apology was offered in the first place when none was necessary. In many cases, the permanently outraged insist that two or three of these are true at the same time, which is why this adds up to 200 percent.

I have come to believe that outrage culture makes apologies pointless. The people who claim to be offended will never accept an apology of any kind and the people who aren’t offended don’t care unless you screw up the apology so badly it becomes a story in itself. It’s a no-win situation.

If you want to publicly apologize because you genuinely think you’ve wronged someone, you should do it. But do it for your own good and that of the person you’re apologizing to. Not only should you not expect any kind of public appreciation, you should expect to be dragged even more for your utter failure as a human being to understand the immense damage you’ve done.

And one other piece of advice: never, ever apologize on YouTube. Issue a press release and leave it at that.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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