Read the first sentence of any government media release issued after something has gone wrong. Most of them start the same way: with information. The facts of the incident, the response that was activated, the names of the organizations involved. By the third paragraph there's usually a quote from a leader. By the fifth, there's a contact for further information. And nowhere in any of it — not in the opening, not in the quote, not in the close — is there a sentence that simply acknowledges what happened to the people it happened to.
It reads professional, but also reads cold; the absence of that one sentence is the difference between a release that lands and a release the public describes, three weeks later, as tone-deaf.<
