Linguistically, denial as a defense mechanism can manifest through negation or statements that reject reality such as "That never happened." It often involves using modal verbs (it can't be true) or distancing pronouns (they say) to create psychological and linguistic detachment.

Example: A smoker who denies health risks might say, "Smoking isn’t actually that dangerous; my grandfather smoked all his life and lived to 90." Here, denial is expressed through a dismissive generalization and anecdotal reasoning rather than engaging with factual evidence.

Hello, Brown and Levinson (1987) developed the theory of politeness, according to which people can develop positive politeness strategies (by highlighting common values) and negative politeness strategies (by remarking differences). Brown and Levinson's theory is based on Face wants and face threatening acts (FTAs) (addressing the "face" of people while trying to help them not "losing" theirs). In the same way, Culpeper described impoliteness as positive and negative. For example, impoliteness can be expressed by going "baldly on record", that means performing the FTA directly and unambigously; by damaging the addressee's positive face wants (for example, by ignoring him/her); by using negative impoliteness (e.g., by frightening or invading the addressee’s space, either literally or metaphorically); by using sarcasm, and (finally) by withholding the FTA.

Therefore, to answer your question, I would say that denial CAN be a form of "going bald on record" depending on how intense and direct the denial is.

References

Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Culpeper Jonathan. 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics25: 349-367.

such lingiuistic cues reveal how language reflect internal psychological resistance to uncomfortable truth