Tylenol,steroids and Ari Fleischer

Tylenol, steroids and baseball, stories land at the feet Ari Fleischer.
I noticed some odd connections between two news items today. Stories surfaced this week about James W. Lewis and his wife, who have supplied DNA and fingerprint samples to the FBI. Both were under suspicion for the 1982 Chicago-area Tylenol tampering case. Lewis served 12 years for attempted extortion, but no one was ever found directly responsible for the seven deaths from taking poison laced Tylenol.

The steps Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, used to mitigate the PR problem surrounding the poisoning is recognized as being perhaps the birth of modern corporate crisis management. Since then, events that could otherwise have been total disasters are seen as manageable crises that, with the correct spin, can be handled in a way which lessens or blunts the PR damage.
The full flowering of crisis management (as pioneered in the Tylenol case) is in the sports pages today. Some characteristics are described in the book Damage Control:

The blurring of the lines between news and entertainment and the rise of the Internet is making aggressive responses to corporate crises more important than ever, Dezenhall and Weber write. Businesses will have to function like modern politicians: communications targeted at sympathetic audiences and pre-emptive attacks on opponents who will seek to undermine companies are the new rules of the game.

Now a man who helped Bush sell the Iraq War is controlling the spin.

The one-day plan — coordinated over the past month by Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary who runs a crisis-communications company, and the St. Louis Cardinals, who recently hired McGwire as their batting coach

He did it all in one afternoon, starting with a statement that was distributed widely to the news media, and that came across the Associated Press wire at 3 p.m.
The A.P. followed quickly with a story that featured an interview with McGwire, who subsequently spoke to numerous other news media outlets — including USA Today and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Tim Kurkjian and John Kruk of ESPN (both by telephone, not on the air); KTRS Radio in St. Louis; and The New York Times, before talking to Bob Costas live at 7 p.m. Eastern on MLB Network.

Mark McGwire’s full frontal corporate media blitz aimed at rehabbing his steroid tainted image is being managed by none other than former Bush White House press spokesman.Ari Fleischer the man that spun the Iraq War.