Word: plaines
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Those who brief, cajole, artfully misdirect or just plain herd the press on behalf of big-time politicians obey a few crucial rules of the road to keep their bosses (and themselves) out of trouble. Rule 1: Stay behind the scenes; the media adviser should never become the story. Rule 2: Don't be nasty; you may disagree with reporters, you may tussle with them, but browbeating eventually backfires. Rule 3: Under no circumstances attack the media as a whole. They are jealous of their prerogatives, and buy ink by the barrel. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's director of communications...
...course, Saddam's fate may be in his own hands. He could refuse to be taken alive. Then again, if he's been following the trial of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic - which has been anything but plain sailing for his accusers - Saddam may be tempted to fight on from within the dock. After all, Iraqis and most Arabs haven't exactly bought into the U.S. narrative of the war. Conspiracy-minded Iraqis opine that, like Milosevic, Saddam could reveal uncomfortable facts about his dealings with the U.S. over the years. (There would certainly be major media interest...
...helping us in Iraq? A simple answer: Why on earth should they? The situation is a mess, in large part because of American arrogance. We insisted on doing the reconstruction on our own (only 13,000 of the 148,000 troops on the ground are British). It seems plain now that going it alone isn't working. Even Donald Rumsfeld came very close to admitting that on Meet the Press a few weeks ago. Asked if we should turn Iraq over to the United Nations, he said, "At some point, I think that--" and then he caught himself and said...
...first move was to play off of Trio's Brilliant but Canceled series, where, in another desperate attempt to get press, the network aired failed series that were loved by critics. My series, Just Plain Canceled, would air really awful shows that bombed. I met with Kris Slava, vice president of acquisitions and scheduling, and gave him a list of shows I wanted to air: The Chevy Chase Show, My Mother the Car, Manimal, Pink Lady and Jeff and Mr. Smith, the 1983 NBC sitcom about an orangutan that ran a Washington think tank. Slava put a lot of work...
True crime isn't really Krakauer's beat--he's the author of Into Thin Air, the bestselling account of a disastrous Everest expedition--but he takes an able, earnest stab at it. It turns out that Ron and Dan weren't just plain crazy. They were members of a fundamentalist Mormon sect, and Krakauer spends much of the book putting their crime in the context of the strange and violent history of the Mormon Church...