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While frozen into paralysis and unable to tell the public the truth about the coming cataclysms, those in government, or their associates, often leak the truth inadvertently or deliberately. Whether deliberate or apparently by accident, the outcome is the same - the public sense some body of knowledge they are not being told about, some alarm, and begins to think for themselves and to look about. There are two main reasons for such leaks:
The first reaction by the government to a significant leak is to ignore
it. This works more often than not, surprisingly, as the public is
watching the broad band of information thrown at it in more ways than one.
Busy with their lives, and concerned about multiple problems, the average
person is flooded with more information than they can process. A type of
screening exists, where a buzz level is watched, and only those news item
that get a lot of buzz are actually listened to or absorbed. If a news
item is a curiosity, or of interest only to a few, then it gets little
buzz. If a news item is significant, it gets discussed repeatedly, with
experts making commentary, and is perhaps talked about by friends and
co-workers. So ignoring a leak, as the Planet X discovery announcement in
1983, often makes the issue go away. Where, as in the case of the Planet X
discovery, it does not go away, it is because follow-on leaks or
a persistent group determined to get the truth out hammers away at the
issue.
The second reaction is to counter the leak, most often by a set of counter
arguments laid out by supposed experts holding information the public does
not have at their disposal, and less often by discrediting the individual
responsible for the leak. NASA is brought forth to proffer privileged
Hubble images, bolstering their statements, while preventing the public
access to the Hubble archieves where the truth indeed lies in bold color.
Discrediting the individual, creating a rash of personal horrors
supposedly committed by the individual, is more risky as this is most
often a fabrication and thus at risk of being discovered as such. If the
individual backs off quietly, the discrediting often succeeds. If they
argue, or persist, matters can get brutal behind the scenes until a
stalemate results, the dishonored one allowed to talk privately about the
unfairness of the treatment, but the public remembering the lies and
smears.
The third reaction is to dilute the impact of the leak, particularly if an
inadvertent leak made by a person or group in agony. The agony of imposed
silence is understood among those in the know, and thus some sympathy
exists for inadvertent leaks. Such a leak was made by Bob Dole when he
announced with fervor in 1996 that the Star Wars program must be
re-activated by 2003 [Note: see 2003
Date
explanation], or in 2000 when the Russian government
lamented about a string of disasters anticipated to hit the country in
2003. These inadvertent leaks cause an embarrassed silence, hand over a
red face, and then an attempt to dilute the impact by the same argument
pointing to different time frames or years. Unless one is looking for the
pattern, and noticing the intensity of distress in the first message that
includes 2003, the pattern is unlikely to be noticed.