A Clear and Present Danger: The Growing Communications Crisis For U.S. Businesses And Their Lawyers
| Author | Richard S. Levick |
| Position | President of Levick Strategic Communications |
| Pages | 01 |
Richard S. Levick, Esq., rlevick@levick.com, is President of Levick Strategic Communications, which has handled the media on the highest-profile matters, from Napster and Guatanamo to the Catholic Church controversy and the Rosie O'Donnell Rosie magazine lawsuit. His new book, STOP THE PRESSES: THE LITIGATION PR DESK REFERENCE, is available on amazon.com. He is a regular contributor to such magazines as Mealey's Emerging Toxic Torts, Asian Counsel, Law Practice, For the Defense, Legal Times, and the National Law Journal.
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AGENERATION AGO, IT WAS CALLED the "Credibility Gap." During the Vietnam War, a significant percentage of the American people - not just the discontent intelligentsia or urban "underclass" - simply lost faith in American authority. They didn't believe anything they heard from government officials or military leaders. To a certain extent, corporations got off easier than the politicians. True, the Left was castigating ITT and Dow Chemicals for alleged global conspiracies of one sort or another. But most Americans disillusioned with the Pentagon had no particular animus toward U.S. business. There were not then such pandemic threats to brand-name corporate reputations or looming investigations of internal corporate behavior. For every Lockheed tagged with a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement, a hundred other companies went their merry way. Most important, in those days there was no so-called "litigation explosion." Even had the American people viewed Palmolive as they viewed General Westmoreland, direct legal and financial exposure was not the inevitable consequence. ITT and Dow were much less likely to meet 12 peers in the hallowed halls of blind justice. Today's post-Enron Credibility Gap does, however, directly implicate corporations in a litigious environment where every new slippage in public confidence makes for an increasingly hostile jury pool. The haunting fact is that slippage anywhere now affects the daily caseloads of American business everywhere. If the military betrays our confidence at Abu Ghraib, it contributes to a generalized distrust that has a potential impact on a product liability case in Portland, Oregon or an employment suit in Portland, Maine.
THIS FALL, DECISIONQUEST, the nation's foremost trial consulting firm, co-sponsored a study with Reuters that measured the diminution of collective confidence in authority. The study shows precisely how such diminution is affecting business in a way that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago. The time frame for the research was from 2000 to 2004, embracing the Florida election recount, the corporate scandals, and the Iraqi war. Of 1,100 respondents, 61% said they had lost faith...
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