sly out of step. Expect the Dumbing Down of Reality The media set the agenda for public discourse and define the environment within which CEOs operate. But the media work on a level well beyond an outsider's reach-what they say is often less important than how they say it and what they have said before. Their impact can't be tallied in clippings. They serve no master but a public that values entertainment as well as informa- tion, and sometimes mistakes the one for the other. The Beginning of the End John Walter looked tired. He was scheduled to speak to a large group of employees at AT&T's corporate education center. We had arranged a series of these meetings to give him a feel for the company and, especially, to show employees that he wasn't the Bozo that the media had made him out to be. This meeting was early in the new year, and Walter had just flown back from Chicago, where he had spent the Christmas holidays with his family. He started out by waving a sheaf of papers at the group. "This is what PR wanted me to say," he said. "It's worthless. I don't think these PR people know anything." Then he threw the papers on the podium and walked out in front of it, saying, "If they do to me what they did to Bob Allen, I'm in trouble." Tough Calls He didn't know it yet, but he was in trouble. And PR had played a small, if unknowing, role in putting him there. Reporters had been pestering us to interview Walter from the day of his appointment. Normally, the safest time to do interviews is when an executive is new to the job. No one really expects him to know anything, SO you don't have to worry about dealing with substantive issues. But the coverage of Walter's appointment had been SO cheeky that we had adopted a strategy of making him available for one-on-one interviews only when the interview was about a specific accomplish- ment, such as a new service. We had steadfastly maintained this posi- tion through the first two months of Walter's tenure, and, as we approached the traditional lull between Christmas and New Y