saying that the company's directors should give Armstrong clear marching orders: "Sell the cable operations to Comcast or leave the company." The New York Times editorialized that there was "a rocky road for AT&T" and predicted Armstrong's "obsolescence."4 Since all the major investment banks were working for AT&T or one of the bidding companies, the newspa- pers had to turn to second- and third-tier analysts for usable quotes. Some of these "experts" simply parroted what they were reading in the same media that were interviewing them. Others had a knack for colorful quotes. Jeff Kagan, a sole practitioner operating out of his Tough Calls home in the Atlanta suburbs, became the single most widely quoted analyst in the telecommunications industry on the strength of his abil- ity to turn a phrase, as in "AT&T has the ball and they appear to be positioning themselves as a real catch." Credibility is earned. It cannot be bought. It's about behavior- delivering on promises, not simply making them. To earn credibility in contentious circumstances, such as a long-running battle between industry players, a company must surrender control to a neutral third party. This is not the same thing as paying people to write letters and give speeches on your behalf. As Clark Judge of the White House Writers Group wrote in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, that's what the Pentagon did in agreeing to "embed" the media with the troops advancing on Baghdad in the first weeks of the Iraqi war. "The essen- tial strategy for becoming the standard of truth when no one believes you," Judge wrote, "is to open your operations to the kind of risk that no one would take if he were planning to lie." He was right, and, in fact, I had tried to convince Armstrong and Noski to let me bring a reporter into the process with the understand- ing that nothing would be written until the auction was completed to avoid compromising the process. They were skeptical but were willing to explore the possibility. The lawyers, on the other hand, were aghast. I