erence at which he predicted that the company would earn "$5 or $6 a share within five years." Those announcements accounted for 54 percent of AT&T's cover- age in the first four months of the year, and, according to MediaLink, their average favorability was 2.0 on a five-point scale on which I is entirely negative. By the time we took control of Walter's media ap- pearances and forced the wireless people to let him announce their fixed wireless project, he had been firmly associated with "bad news." Although the announcement of a wireless end run around the Bell companies garnered highly positive press (4.99 on MediaLink's favor- ability scale), it was too little too late to help John Walter's image. This also explains why we were SO determined to get some measure of control over the speculation about our merger discussions with SBC. As always happens in these cases, after everyone had reported on the Wall Street Journal's report, most reporters started looking for a fresh angle, calling their own sources, and writing their own specula- tive stories. Everyone with an agenda ended up in print, and three major themes evolved: (I) AT&T isn't SO serious about competitive local markets, (2) this harebrained idea is unthinkable and should be dead on arrival, and (3) it's the last desperate act of a chairman who wants to retire in a blaze of glory. This was not a good position to be in. People started interpreting our actions through the lens of what they thought was really going on. For example, when we ended local marketing in California because of Pacific Telesis's clumsy ordering systems, the generally accepted wisdom was that this was somehow related to our negotiations with SBC. That was not very well received in other states where we were arguing for lower wholesale rates. Agenda setting is probably the most significant role that the media Expect the Dumbing Down of Reality play in public discourse. Political scientist Bernard Cohen put it most succinctly when he wrote that the press "may not be successful much 