Ok.. I've been stewing about this for a couple of days and have been lighting up the message ABC message board about the hack reporting job that was done on LAWL last week on 20/20..
If you haven't seen the story, go here:
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/
The forum is here:
http://forums.go.com/abcnews/2020/fo...&byThread=true
What really cheeses me off about this is the lack of integrity displayed by the so-called reporter.. She went into the story with an agenda - to sniff out a scam.. And of course, she found a way to do just that.. Anyone with no media experience would have seen this story and would have been convinced that LAWL Centers are a hot bed of evil and villany..
NO attempt was made to show the other side of the story, other than the usual "LAWL officials had little or no comment" - a fact that I wholeheartedly blame LAWL for allowing to happen.. A company this big needs to have a compentent public relations staff that knows how to handle what we call "Crisis Communication".. When you are attacked, the WORST thing you can do is issue a cookie cutter statement about how good you are or even worse, say "no comment"...
That said, even if they had a decent
PR staff, I doubt the reporter, if I can really call her that, would have cared to do the research on how the plan really works.
All she did was fake her way onto the plan and then didn't even give it a chance to work. Add that to the handful of disgruntled employees who always have the loudest voices, and you've got a ready made story.
The fact is that yes, there are some LAWL employees who excell in the "hard sell" and are able to exploit it. Ever buy a car? Geez.. If we all acted like this about car salesmen, none of us would be driving! And yes, there are LAWL staff who don't know the job as well as they should and who are not "people persons" and thus, probably shouldn't be working there.. NAME ME ONE FREAKIN' COMPANY THAT DOESN'T.!!!!
If you don't go into LAWL realizing that of course, they are going to try to sell you a bunch of stuff, then you really should have done your homework. It's a business.. They can't make any money by not selling stuff..
I know some of you here have had bad or mixed experiences with LAWL COD's, and I'm not putting any blame on you.. What I'm really pizzed off about is how one-sided and blatently unethical this reporter was.. It's crap like this that really got me out of the news business.. I couldn't stand the biased, kill or be killed attitude that we had to have..
Sorry to vent, but I really am upset about this.. If you read the ABC message boards, you can probably figure out who I am, but if not, my handle there is djmarillion..