IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.(corporations, negative publicity)

In the early nineteen-eighties, American businesses discovered that they could manage crises, rather than merely stumble through them. The gold standard was Johnson & Johnson, whose deft maneuvering, after seven people died from ingesting cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol, helped create a new and lucrative subset of public relations known as crisis management, which was poised, as Time put it in 1986, to become "the new corporate discipline."

Practice--and lately there's been plenty of it--has not made perfect. Companies may now have packs of super-flacks on hand, but in the glare of bad publicity they can still appear as helpless as possums in the road. In the past few years, stalwarts like Firestone, CBS News, Tyco, and Marsh & McLennan have seen their reputations demolished, mainly because they did such a lousy job of dealing with bad news. Most recently, Wendy's took a month to discredit a woman who claimed that she'd found a human finger in her chili. (She's since been arrested for putting it there.) The delay cost millions of dollars in sales and did incalculable harm to the brand.

The term "crisis management" may seem like little more than a euphemism for "snow job," but there is an art to it. Spin alone won't do the trick. Without going overboard, the offending company needs to acknowledge that it has a problem, demonstrate that it has control over that problem, and then make a real attempt to fix it. This holds true whether or not the company is at fault. Johnson & Johnson defused the Tylenol crisis in large part because it recalled every Tylenol capsule in America, and then quickly introduced tamper-proof bottles. In the end, the company was seen as the victim. By contrast, when news broke, in 2000, that more than a hundred people had died in accidents involving defective Firestone tires, Firestone initially reacted by blaming drivers (for underinflating their tires) and Ford (whose S.U.V.s were involved in most of the accidents). Dispirited by this strategy, Firestone's P.R. firm quit. Eventually, Firestone recalled 6.5 million tires, but it was too late. Sales plummeted, and claims mounted into the hundreds of millions.

Many companies have basic assumptions about public relations that can hurt them during a crisis. They tend, as people do, to stonewall and deny. But, as Ian Mitroff, a crisis-management specialist at U.S.C., has said, "There are no secrets in today's world." And if the truth is on your side you have to insure that it emerges quickly. In 1993, when syringes ended up in Pepsi soda cans, allegedly as a result of a flawed canning process, the company, within a few days, produced videos of its entire canning process and denounced its accusers as frauds. Wendy's, on the other hand, wasted a month investigating its entire supply chain, made little of the fact that the accuser had a long history of suing companies on dubious grounds, and, ...