The finest example of the full flowering of corporate crisis management (as pioneered in the Tylenol tampering case) was in the sports pages Tuesday. Ari Fleischer, who helped Bush sell the Iraq War, is controlling the campaign to guide Mark McGwire through his steroid induced image problem.  

Some elements of contemporary crisis management as described in the book Damage Control are:  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.  

By a strange quirk, the Tylenol case is back in the headlines as well. Stories surfaced this week about James W. Lewis and his wife who have been under suspicion for the 1982 Chicago-area Tylenol tampering case. In this incident seven deaths were caused by poison laced Tylenol.  

The steps Johnson & Johnson 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.  

Fleischer’s crisis management firm, spiritual heir to the lessons learned in the Tylenol case, has taken on Mark McGwire’s full frontal corporate media blitz.  

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.

IMG sports media management which represents Bob Costas has a joint partnership with Fleischer Sports Communication. Ari proves again that he can still control the pitches almost as well as back in the White House days.