Barack Obama

Dem Past Mistakes

To engage or not to engage…that is the question. For as long as I can remember, good crisis managers stressed avoiding knee-jerk reactions to unpleasant characterizations in the media of your company or person. Crisis pros advised: “Why draw attention to something that will disappear with the next news cycle?” “You’ll only make matters worse.”

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“The Spirit of the Cover”

It would be fairly easy to jump on The New Yorker-bashing bandwagon today for its satirical cover featuring Barack and Michelle Obama as fictionalized Muslim terrorist and fist-bumping radical, respectively. It would be easy if one didn’t truly get the shock culture of Condé Nast wherein David Remnick’s glossed-out siblings have few qualms about popping

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“Trained in Spin”

The Washington Post‘s main media man Howard Kurtz today profiles Senator Obama’s newly anointed press secretary Linda Douglass, a former broadcast TV political reporter. In the course of the interview, Ms. Douglass makes an observation about jumping to “the dark side”: “The thing that really made me feel at peace with the decision is this

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Debatable Instincts

A firm for which I once toiled had a policy that discouraged its professionals from commenting in the media on the public relations quagmires of others. I think it stemmed from an incident in which one of our Asian colleagues publicly skewered the PR strategy for a very high profile crisis. One problem: it was

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