Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I’ve written before about the dangers of uttering “quotes of denial,” in which the word “not” is placed immediately before a negative noun or adjective. The problem is that the defensive-sounding negative word or phrase tends to linger longer in the public memory than the word “not.”

So when Chris Christie uttered the phrase “I am not a bully” during his marathon press conference on Thursday, I knew it would be used against him. Sure enough, here’s the cover from this weekend’s USA Today Weekend...