Did General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who signs the checks for the folks at NBC News, ask NBC chief Andrew Lack to call the presidential election in favor of George W. Bush well before the election was actually over? According to Representative Henry Waxman, Welch did pay a visit to the NBC control room that night last November, cheering whenever Bush was ahead and griping whenever Gore took the lead. At one point he asked a staffer, "What would I have to give you to call the race for Bush?" And he was ultimately the one who gave the order to actually do so.

In a recent memo titled "Talking to the Press," Polk Laffoon, Knight Ridders's VP for corporate relations, laid out some media relations "rules of thumb" for the company's executives, publishers, and editors. In the memo, which was leaked to the Philadelphia Weekly, Laffoon writes: "Reporters who want to do take-outs on the company virtually always have an agenda. If the agenda isn't friendly (often the case), we muster whatever facts and figures we can to refute or blunt it. Although it would be rare that a reporter changes the agenda based on what we say, we can have an impact.

Calling his current jobless status "an exciting, much-needed opportunity to reassess my direction in life," former Porter Novelli public-relations executive Josh Wallace has great things to say about unemployment reports the Onion, a satirical newspaper. "I wasn't fired so much as my job was one of the positions phased out through the outsourcing of certain activities and the restructured insourcing of others, " Wallace said. See also O'Dwyer's PR story.