Page 251 - Executive Warfare

The New Bosses

“Because you’ve written terrible things about me. Before you write
more terrible things about me, don’t you think you should meet me? That
way, you can write terrible things about the meeting.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s worth a drink.”
So we met for a beer.“I don’t want to talk about your columns,” I said.
He was surprised. “You don’t?”
“No,” I said. “It’s America. You can
write whatever you want. I just want to REPORTERS HAVE A
show you I’m not quite as bad a guy as RIGHT TO THEIR
you think.” So we talked about politics POINT OF VIEW,
mostly. After that, his coverage was no AND IT’S NOT
longer slanted against me. It was ALWAYS SMART TO
straight reporting. HOLD IT AGAINST
It is America. Reporters have a right THEM.
to their point of view, and it’s not always
smart to hold it against them. If, how-
ever, a reporter lies about you or proves that he has an ax to grind, that is
a different story. I refuse to talk to somebody like that.
Sometimes, reporters are so determined to tell the story their own
slanted way that they’d prefer not to talk to you. There was one reporter
who wrote a piece in which he claimed that he’d called me six times for a
comment and I’d never responded.
This was a story I would have responded to. So I had our phone logs
pulled. There were no calls from this reporter—none from his office num-
ber, none from his cell number, and none from his home number. I had
my PR people call his editor and let the editor know he’d lied in print. He
soon left that publication.
Then he went to work at another, where he continued skewering us.We
refused to speak to him. Finally, the business editor there called and said,
“You can’t just ignore us.”
Yes, we could. We told him why, and the editor pulled the reporter off
our beat.

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