nd with twenty-four-hour news channels, the Internet, and instant communication, that environment can swing rapidly from sunny skies to storm clouds and every climate in between. However, the di- nosaurs were not done in by a rapid drop in temperature. They slipped off their evolutionary path because they were incapable of reacting to those changing conditions. The interlinked saga of John Walter and our merger discussions with SBC was one more demonstration of how media coverage affects an organization's operational freedom and constraints. People have a very complicated relationship with the news media. For example, the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Expect the Dumbing Down of Reality Tversky demonstrated that people's attitudes and behavior depend in good measure on how information is presented to them. Until they have been put into the framework of a news story, most facts are bless- edly neutral, but a story's framing is actually a more reliable predictor of a reader's subsequent beliefs than the substance of the story itself. Familiar or vivid examples can skew judgments more than abstract but more accurate-data, and first impressions shape subsequent atti- tudes. Kahneman and Tversky called this the "availability error," and it explains why it can be SO difficult to reverse a long string of negative news or to correct a story's slant after it has taken hold. Mathematician John Allen Paulos points out that public response to most big stories is strongly colored by past stories, even if those past stories are only superficially similar, because they are "psychologically available." What he calls "anchoring effects" inhibit people from moving too far from "conventional wisdom" or from the latest "facts" that they have been presented with, even if those "facts" are wrong. The "halo effect" causes people to judge a person or a company in terms of one salient characteristic, which may be positive (e.g., gradu- ating from a prestigious university) or negative (e.g., being associated with a string 