d eventually got out of control and the president resigned rather than face impeachment.
In contrast, after a Washington Post reporter won the Pulitizer Prize for a feature article that actually was fiction, the reporter admitted that the piece was fiction and the newspaper accepted a share of the responsibility. The reporter was allowed to keep the prize.?FN1Carole Howard and Wilma Mathews, ?MDUL?On Deadline: Managing Media Relations (New York: Longman, Inc., 1985) p. 97.
? Although the initial act was unethical, the response to the problem was ethical. The newspaper preserved its reputation, instead or risking great damage to its reputation by trying to keep the true nature of the story a secret.
Some writers have identified "generic" types of corporate disasters that occur frequently in today's society. Of these, two types of crises can be created by third parties: "guilt by unwarranted association" (such as Atari's problem with an x rated game cartridge created by another party), and "product or service tampering" (such as the case of the Tylenol poisonings). It has been suggested that companies will have a growing need for public relations services to deal with these types of problems.?FN1E. W. Brody, ?MDUL?The Business of Public Relations?MDNM? (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1987) p. 35.
Johnson & Johnson has been given credit for the excellent manner in which it handled the Tylenol crisis. Obviously, the company was not at fault for the poisonings, because the product had been tampered with. But after seven people died in Chicago, the company had a serious public relations problem customers were afraid to buy Tylenol. How would J&J stop the problem? How would it reassure its customers? The company took decisive action: it pulled all Tylenol off the market. Rather than leaving doubts in customers' minds by letting store security deal with the prob lem, this action had the instant impact making sure there ...