The Director of Crisis Media for the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, Paul Clark, had a few words of advice on crisis management for public officials handling the Hurricane Katrina disaster. "One of the first concepts is to accept blame if it applies ... people forgive mistakes, but they don't forgive excuses," Clark told the St. Petersburg Times. "Make full disclosure of the facts, but don't speculate on things you don't know ... like death estimates." Several days earlier Associated Press reported that the Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response in the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown, included a little PR advice in a memo seeking approval from his superiors for the dispatch of 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the disaster area. In the leaked memo Brown noted that the deployment of the employees would be expected to "convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public."
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