John McCain

Shades of Tawana

Have you been following this desperate and bizarre story? It centers around a twisted 20-year-old Texan who went to Pennsylvania to throw her support behind the McCain campaign, and instead may have thrown the campaign. Apparently Joe the Plumber’s distant cousin concocted a story in which she was mugged and mutilated by a “6’4″ black […]

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Voodoo Doctors

How much influence does post-debate coverage have in determining the evening’s ultimate winner and loser? A considerable amount, if you believe the WashPost’s media watcher Howard Kurtz who today turned his sights on the “spin doctors” who were working their “voodoo” at Ole Miss following Friday’s stand-off: “Obama may have won the insta-polls after Friday’s

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“Reasonable Promotion and Publicity”

So what constitutes reasonable promotion and publicity: a pop on ET, feature in the LA Times, an OK magazine spread, all of the above? That’s the question the lawyers for the company that produced “National Lampoon’s Pledge This” want answered as they sue Paris Hilton for non-performance…of her PR duties. No one can accuse the

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News Hole Partisans

Presidential politics was on the menu at Michael’s (alongside the $34 cobb salad) during a recent gathering of our men’s lunch group of PRs, journos and one special guest, the head of a magazine publishing company. The day’s topic explored the variables that might still make a measurable impact on the candidates’ respective fates. It

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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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