of negative news stories). We generally see what we ex- pect to see.9 All this helps to explain how the media put John Walter in short pants from the day of his announcement as AT&T's new president. At Donnelly, he had been seen as a visionary and highly effective leader. Many newspapers, in fact, presented his credentials accurately. The Wall Street Journal story, for example, was arguably quite positive in substance. It described him as "a charismatic manager who coupled teamwork and technology with an iron-fisted focus on profit growth at Chicago-based Donnelley. "IO But the sarcasm of the headline in that paper- -"Bell's Curve: A Telecom Novice Is Handed Challenge of Re- making AT&T"-along with similar jibes elsewhere created a first im- pression that was hard to correct. In hindsight, we should have kept to our first strategy of allowing all this to die down by focusing Walter on the nuts and bolts of the business and making him available only when he had something con- crete to announce. There were several such opportunities in the first quarter of 1997-we announced a new "PocketNet" wireless phone with Internet capabilities, for example-but Walter had already alien- ated the leadership of the wireless division and played no role in its introduction. By contrast, when AT&T Wireless introduced the first Tough Calls single-rate nationwide calling plan, Digital One Rate, Mike Armstrong hosted the news conference and made the announcement on behalf of the entire company. Ironically, the PocketNet phone accounted for II percent of AT&T's news coverage in the first four months of 1997 and had a perfect favorability rating, as measured by an outside researcher, Delahaye MediaLink. Walter, on the other hand, was more closely associated with the "firing" of Joe Nacchio in the last month of 1996, the an- nouncement of the prior year's lackluster earnings in the first month of the new year, the defection of an international partner to a rival, a 30 percent drop in first-quarter earnings, and a financial analysts' conf