Both the Terrible Apologies blog and Ari Kohen — one of the blog’s founders — make an appearance in the Christian Science Monitor’s piece on public apology:
Public apologies are so common these days that multiple websites have sprung up just to keep track of who is asking forgiveness of whom. Effectiveapologies.com, for instance, has a running “apology of the week,” and the just-launched terribleapologies.tumblr.com ranks the worst of them.
Here’s what Kohen has to say on the topic in the piece:
The 24/7 media culture is partly responsible for the explosion of apologies, says Ari Kohen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
A hyper-connected online culture means more and more opportunities to say or do something offensive, he notes. This also means that “more and more people are watching, listening, and most importantly ‘sharing’ the offensive thing that someone has said or done,” he says via e-mail, adding, “so we’re seeing the offensive statement or action more than perhaps we would have, which yields more calls for apology, which in turn yields more and more terrible apologies.”
Professor Kohen and a student launched the terribleapologies blog two days ago in response to Rivera’s apology quagmire, with the intent of studying just how bad an apology can be, he says.
“It’s tempting to think that these bad apologies don’t matter for the people who make them,” he says, citing both Rivera and conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh, who issued what many dubbed a non-apology after calling a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
“That must be what Rush Limbaugh and Geraldo Rivera are hoping – but I think that the public won’t be so fast to forget. Indeed, with social networking, my sense is that a bad public apology can hang around for a really long time and can have fairly serious adverse effects (like the campaign targeting Limbaugh’s sponsors, for example). Indeed, there’s more interest in bad apologies right now than I might have thought,” he says.
Read the whole piece, which also features very interesting comments on apology and forgiveness from Aaron Lazare — whose excellent book, On Apology, Kohen teaches in his class on public apology and reconciliation — and from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.
