I can imagine Tiger Woods talking to one of his advisors, hopefully someone who understands PR:

Advisor: Tiger, we have to say more about what happened. You’re being criticized everywhere and people are making up bizarre rumors.

Tiger: It’s nobody’s business but mine and I refuse to give in to all those people who want to know my dirty laundry. I can rise above all this. I’m not about to sink to their level.

Advisor: The truth is the only thing that’s going to shut this down. The longer you stonewall the longer the speculation will go on. In the meantime, your image is being tarnished.

Tiger: My image is fine. I make those advertisers millions and millions of dollars and nobody would dare to drop me as spokesperson.

Advisor: I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Unfortunately you’re not a normal person. You’re the best golfer in the world making huge amounts of money because the public worships you. You can’t have it both ways. If you want the their attention during good times, you have to fess up and be open when things go wrong.

Tiger: I’m Tiger Woods. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. Screw them.

No, Tiger, you’re the one who’s screwed. The truth will ultimately come out, one way or another. If you had been ahead of the story, you could have had some control of the message. Now, despite your mansion and millions, you’re at the mercy of “them”.

The 16 members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are researchers, scientists, and healthcare professionals. I doubt any of them has ever crafted a communications plan or formulated key messages. I would guess few if any have gone through much media training. Their skills lie in other areas.

So where were the PR professionals who should have helped prevent the stumbling, bumbling results of the Task Force’s recommendations on mammograms?

The Preventive Services Task Force is part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Its website lists a press contact as well as an Office of Communications and Knowledge Transfer. Knowledge was transferred all right, but it was cold, calloused and confusing. Shouldn’t someone have helped these people plan their strategy before going public?

Granted the task force should have known better and asked for help. Its members were naive and stupid about the impact their recommendation would have. From their perspective, they’d done a yeoman’s job, spending weeks and months focusing on facts and figures to come up with a surprising result.

Unfortunately, they forgot about the human faces behind those facts and figures.

Don’t you just love a good scandal? Especially one that’s so blatantly hypocritical?

Mike Duvall, a pro-family values member of the California Assembly, got caught talking with a fellow committee member about his extra-marital sexual exploits.

Duvall and the other Assemblyman, Jeff Miller, were waiting for a meeting to begin and apparently didn’t realize their mics were open. Duvall went into lurid detail (TMI) about his sexual activity with two women, including a lobbyist 18 years younger than him.

“So, I am getting into spanking her. Yeah, I like it. I like spanking her.”

“She wears little eye-patch underwear…the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. So we had made love Wednesday—a lot!” (Ewwwwww)

Another irony—Miller, the one who was listening, is a member of the Assembly Ethics Committee, which is investigating whether he should be punished for not reporting Duvall. Miller claims “he wasn’t really paying attention.” Ah, yeah, right.

Duvall is married (at least for now) and has two children. He resigned from the Assembly yesterday.

Funny thing about anger. We all have episodes of it, unfortunately not always in private. We all know it’s part of the human condition. Yet, when we witness someone else losing their temper in public, we tend to judge them harshly: “what a loose canon,” “what a hothead,” “gee, he/she has a real anger problem.”

We all have certain buttons that are easier to push than others. Often, the media (and our significant other) is adept at pushing them. New York Governor David Paterson is a recent example.

In an angry rant during a radio interview last week, Paterson seemed to say that his political problems and the media’s attacks of him were due to racism. “The next victim on the list—and you can see it coming—is President Barack Obama, who did nothing more than try to reform a health care system,” he said.

The reaction wasn’t good, even from other African Americans. The President’s aides were so upset that Paterson had dragged Obama into the issue that they sent him an angry message.

Yesterday Paterson took it all back, claiming that what he said wasn’t what he really meant. The root of the problem, he said, was anger at something else (kind of like when you have a bad day at work and you come home and yell at your husband or the kids).

Paterson says what he was really upset about was the accusation by a local TV reporter that he was a bad parent because he let his underage daughter (who in reality is 21) stay out late clubbing.

Major button pushing for a person who views himself as, and prides himself as, a good father. But then you cool down (and get scolded by the President) and realize your mistakes: Letting anger prevail over reason and criticizing the media. Bad combination.

Good thing John Edwards didn’t become president of the U.S. The guy obviously can’t strategize his way out of a paper bag, let alone run a country.

Common PR sense says when you’ve done something bad, spill the beans—all of the beans—at once. Don’t let bad news come out in drabs and dribbles. Get it out, aplogize if necessary, take your lumps, let the story die.

Stupidly, John Edwards has done just the opposite. Last year he went on national TV to admit his affair with Rielle Hunter. But in that interview with ABCs Bob Woodruff, Edwards vehemently denied being the father of Hunter’s baby girl. He said it just wasn’t possible.

Now reports say, after taking a DNA test, Edwards is about to admit that in fact he is the father. Once again, we’ll have days of stories about the slimy ex-senator and how he’s betrayed his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth.

And once again, Edwards’ arrogance and/or cowardice has come back to bite him. He believed—or desperately hoped—his elaborate cover-up would work. It didn’t. And now he may be accused of not only sleazy behavior but also criminal actions: breaking campaign finance laws by paying hush money to Hunter and one of his aides.

Elizabeth Edwards deserves better.

A twist in the story of the infamous Twitter lawsuit, which went viral on Twitter Tuesday, shows why even if reporters have a sense of humor, trying to be funny doesn’t always come out in print the way you expected.

It also shows that getting PR help and media training after a gaffe is like buying a burglar alarm after your house is robbed.

Horizon, a real-estate management company in Chicago, filed a $50,000 lawsuit against Amanda Bonnen after she sent what they claimed was a “malicious and defamatory” tweet: “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s OK.”

While responding to questions about the suit, one of the owners of Horizon, Jeffrey Michael, gave the Chicago Sun Times what seemed like one of the most outrageously honest quotes in recent history: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of organization.”

As word spread across the internet, Michael realized his mistake. He—and a PR firm he apparently brought in to help rescue him—sent out a statement apologizing for his “tongue and cheek comments” regarding his company’s approach to litigation. And of course he added the old “out of context” excuse.

He went on to explain that Horizon’s lawsuit came in response to a class action lawsuit Bonnen has filed against his company. At the end of the statement—which should have been at the beginning—he said his company takes allegations of mold very seriously.

Even if Michael was being flip, he obviously doesn’t understand how reporters work and how irresistible his quote would be. If his company was going to sue someone over a tweet, shouldn’t he have been prepared with his statement before the media called rather than after?

You probably heard that a parking garage collapsed in Atlanta this week. Soon afterward, a spokeswoman for Hardin Construction, the company that built the structure, emailed a statement that included these two sentences:

“To put this in perspective there are 1,415 spaces in this deck,” said Barkley Russell. “One section was involved, and it is estimated that approximately 35 spaces were affected.”

Luckily, no one was hurt in the collapse, but at the time Russell released this statement, police planned to make another sweep of the property. What if someone had been found dead? The statement from Hardin would have looked very cold-hearted.

Even without death or injury, trying to minimize a crisis insults the people who have been or could have been affected—like those whose cars were crushed in the collapse, or families who worried about someone they thought could be injured.

Minimizing what happened may make the company feel better about the situation, but it’s likely to come back and bite you.

A linebacker from the University of Texas, Sergio Kindle, crashed his car into an apartment building in Austin. His attorney, Brian Roark, admitted Kindle lost control while sending or receiving a text message.

“It was probably something he should not have been doing,” Roark said.

Gee, ya think so? Hope Roark is better in the court room than he is with the media.

If you haven’t seen South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s news conference about his affair, you gotta take a listen. Calling it “rambling” is an understatement. He didn’t mention the reason for the news conference—”I’ve been unfaithful to my wife”—until 8 minutes into his statement. Up until then, and afterward, it was a mess of incoherent blather.

Obviously there was no preparation, no “messaging,” no clear goal, and while it was entertaining, I’m afraid he did himself more harm than good. Sometimes, the more you talk the bigger the hole you dig for yourself.

I know apologizing in public is the right thing to do to put bad news behind you. I’ve been preaching that for more than 20 years. But it’s getting awfully old. Especially since when most of these guys say “I’m sorry” what they really mean is “I’m sorry I got caught.”

Not surprisingly, MySpace has announced the layoff of hundreds of employees—30% of the workforce. In an email to employees, CEO Owen Van Natta hit all the right notes, explaining the reasons for the RIF, empathy for those affected, and hope for the future.

I especially liked this statement.

“These decisions are difficult for everyone, but especially for our friends and colleagues who contributed to MySpace’s success and are directly affected by the changes. Through no fault of theirs our company’s size became unsustainable.”

Then MySpace issued a press release. That nice statement about the company’s size being unsustainable turned into this quote: “Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company.”

Pretty poor choice of words. If I had been laid off after being a loyal, dedicated employee who helped put MySpace on the map, I would resent being characterized as “bloat”. Van Natta (or the PR team) should have stuck with his earlier description, “unsustainable”.

Yes, sticks and stones may break my bones…and…yes, words can hurt a lot.