The Corporate World's Top 10 Bottom Feeders

PR industry analyst Paul Holmes notes that the corporate scandals of last year created a "chronic crisis, as constituents - shareholders, employees, regulators, the public at large - began to question whether the entire American corporate system was hopelessly corrupt." (As an indicator of how bad things got, Holmes was forced to combine Enron, Worldcom and Tyco into a single item in his "top 10" list of the year's worst PR disasters.) "Ordinarily," Holmes writes, "such an epidemic of ill-considered corporate behavior would have elevated the role of the senior corporate communications executive to a permanent place in the CEO's inner circle, and provided a bonanza of new business for public relations firms. But in 2002, those gains conspicuously failed to materialize." Maybe that's because the scandals run so deep that PR can't fix them. "There was no way to spin the kind of outrageous personal and institutional behavior that gave rise to these crises," Holmes writes.