CorpComms Magazine

Believe it, these are testing times for companies singled out in the press as the next likely victims of the US economic malaise. An outright rebuttal is no longer enough to kill a story that has the potential to rattle shareholders, scare off lenders, send regular clients running for the hills and obliterate your firm altogether. Just ask anyone who used to work at investment bank Bear Stearns.

Still, it's quite unusual for a company to put out a two-page press release slamming an individual article in quite such scathing terms as Freddie Mac did last month.

The missive was aimed at a story by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times, which argued that the chief executive of the government sponsored mortgage finance company ignored internal warnings that could have prevented some of its current financial woes. It blasted 'a superficial tale spun on the purported comments of a collection of anonymous former employees and unspecified 'others' -likely including the well-worn band of idealogues and self-interested detractors who have opposed the government-sponsored enterprise model for years.' Take that, Charles. And that was just the opening paragraph.

The release also attacked the 'highly selective cherry-picking of quotes from extensive interviews and information the reporter received', although it must be said that Duhigg picked a corker from harried chief executive Richard Syron, which made the New York Times' quote of the day. 'If I had better foresight, maybe I could have improved things a little bit,' he said. 'But frankly, if I had perfect foresight, I would never have taken this job in the first place.'

And perfect foresight might have alerted Syron that he would lose his job within weeks, after the US government was forced to bail out the troubled Freddie Mac and its sister Fannie Mae. Maybe that's what they really meant by government-sponsored enterprise.

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