Ok, sometimes I need to keep it light.  I was totaly awed by the sunrise sky and clouds this morning on the way to downtown D.C., so pulled out my trusty high definition flip-cam and took this very brief video:  Read More →

When corporate or association executives ask if they should go on 60 Minutes, my stock answer is “no,” that’s the worst way for an organization under fire to gets its side of the story out.  Sorry, 60 Minutes, you are great television, just lousy journalism. Nothing personal, but your format requires telling a human interest story, and that means heroes and villains.  Real life just isn’t that clear cut, and why would anyone willingly play the part of the villain? There are some times, however few and far between, when there is no one else to defend the company, organization, individual, or industry in the cross hairs, so someone has to play that role– no matter how painful that may be.  That happened last night, when 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl went after the electric utilities responsible for the waste coal ash being stored at plants around the country. The industry spokesman did his best, perhaps made a couple mistakes on how he answered, but nevertheless took the predictable villain’s drubbing. But the inevitable question after the show airs is, should the target of the 60 Minutes story respond in some way after it has been on. My default position is “no,” and here’s... 

There were a lot of scratching heads last night when David Letterman announced that he was being subjected to attempted blackmail because he had had sexual affairs with more than one member of his CBS staff. The question, of course, was why announce it to the whole world on his nightly show. Well, there’s nothing magic about. I assumed that some sort of lawsuit or criminal case was about to be announced, so Letterman needed to get out in front of the story. And judging by this afternoon’s news, that’s exactly what happened. The New York Times is reporting that the District Attorney has announced charges of blackmail in the case. As any regular reader of this blog surely knows by now, I always advise clients to get out in front of bad news, so they themselves are telling the story in their context, and not allowing the story to be owned by adversaries, prosecutors, or outside observers who may not have their same interests in mind. There are some exceptions, of course. The last thing you want to do is create a news story when otherwise no one would pay attention. That clearly would never be the case for a celebrity like Letterman, but for lesser know executives that is always the balance that must be struck.  Read More →

Great move by the White House. Here are my thoughts in a discussion with Media Bistros PRNewser yesterday.  Read More →

It’s never a good thing when someone passes, but the death of columnist William Safire brought to mind a run-in I had with him some years ago. The experience left me with with a sour taste in my mouth, I have to admit, because up until that time I did admire him as a journalist. The issue behind Safire’s calls to me dated back to my days on the House Government Operations Committee in 1995 and 1996, after the Republicans had taken control of the House and used the Committee as its main platform for attacks on President Clinton. One of those investigations was into the so called FBI Files that the Secret Service would routinely transmit to the White House for clearance purposes, only somehow the previous administration’s files had gotten to the Clinton staff by mistake. Without going into the boring details, two high-ranking Secret Service officials had testified under oath to the Committee that it could not have produced such records, implying that the White House had somehow nefariously used these records for political payback. Eight months later, Ken Starr released to the Committee records showing that in fact the errant files had come from the Secret Service. The ranking Democrat on the Committee– my...