Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

Dear Mr. Cohen:

Thank you for your insightful commentary on CBS This Morning this morning.

Having a member of the legal profession slam the public relations industry for its (lack of) truthfulness is right up there with the pot calling the kettle black. Are you freaking serious?

Did you—a lawyer—really just call me a liar in front of millions of viewers?

And to think you’re a fellow Boston University Terrier. WTF, man?

Seems to me we walked the same stretch of Commonwealth Avenue in the late 80s but I’ll be damned if I ever met you. Or you me. But you call me a liar?

You don’t even know me. You don’t know what I stand for or how I’ve conducted my business for the past 20 years. You don’t know my clients or what we’ve been through together. You don’t know my standards or the standards I’ve established for my company and my people.

And you call me a liar?

Calling all PR professionals liars is akin to any ethnic slur you can pile on any race of people. I don’t suppose anybody’s ever hurled a blanket statement at a person named Cohen, have they?

But I guess the rules of decency, fairness and ethics don’t really apply to you as you say in this 2002 interview:

“I have a little more leeway as an analyst. I try not to say, ‘This is outrageous,’ because people who offer more heat than light tend to tick people off. I’m held to standards of accuracy and fairness, of course. But provided my legal training, role and experience, fairness is defined a little more broadly than a correspondent’s position would be.”

How broadly would you define fairness in this instance, Mr. Cohen? Are you suggesting that lawyers have a broader standard fo fairness than the average journalist? And how do your standards of fairness for journalists and lawyers stack up to those governing PR pros?

I’m curious. 

Give me a call sometime and we’ll talk about it.

Yours sincerely,

BP