Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

David Marriott never visited Amanda Knox during her four years in an Italian prison.

He met her this month, when she stepped off a plane in Seattle.

Yet for Knox and her family, Marriott was as important a player in her ordeal as anyone in the courtroom. As Knox’s publicist, beginning three days after her arrest, Marriott worked to convince the international public that she did not murder her British roommate while studying in Perugia.

Harassment charges are important. But so is so much else.

And so here we are, into the second week of Cain-demonium: the breathless reporting, speculating, and opining about the late-1990s sexual harassment—or is it something more now?—controversy that has come to haunt (or help?) the candidacy of Herman Cain.

Just when it looked like the media had finally tired of the matter, enter Gloria Allred and the biggest break in the story yet: a press conference with Sharon Bialek, the first accuser to go public. Yesterday’s press conference was deemed roundly big and newsworthy, live-blogged by Andrew Sullivan and livestreamed by CNN, Slate, and Politico. And TMZ....

Like most crises, this one was predictable and mostly avoidable. With the volume of passengers and cargo handled by major airlines, missing or damaged luggage is common.

A missing pet should set off crisis management alarm bells all over the place but apparently not at American Airlines.

The story began when Karen Pascoe and her longhair cat Jack arrived at New York’s JFK airport for a flight to California six weeks ago. That’s when the fur began to fly....