Tiki Barber, a former running back for the New York Giants, has hired the 5W Public Relations agency in New York to try and repair his image after he left his wife, who was eight months pregnant with twins, for a former NBC intern. 5W Public Relations is the third PR agency Barber has hired to try and burnish his image. The couple also has two other sons, ages 7 and 6. In Barber's memoir, "Tiki: My Life in the Game and Beyond," published in 2007, he wrote about the kind of man he wanted to be for his kids, saying "I want to be an honorable man, because that's what I want them both to be. My family is everything to me."

The PR debacles of BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs show the limits of what public relations can do for companies in crisis. These three companies all made the same fundamental mistakes in handling their crises. Letting CEOs ad-lib during a crisis can lead to Sound-Bite Hell, as with BP CEO Tony Hayward, whose list of gaffes sank the last of the company's tattered reputation. Toyota blew it by waiting so long to address reported problems with its vehicles, then by stonewalling, and then offering what looked like false reassurance by pinning their cars' reported acceleration problems on floor mats. Goldman Sachs dismissed allegations of fraud by arguing that, in effect, that it had been running a giant casino, in which it had inside information. A crisis management expert at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, Howard Anderson, compared Goldman's conduct with the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. "The priests thought they should be protecting one another rather than the children in their care," he says. "Goldman now has the same problem. It turns out it's, 'We make money for ourselves first, and our customers second,' when it should be the other way around. This is going to hurt them for years." All three companies broke basic rules of crisis management: They didn't have a crisis plan ready in advance, they tried to minimize the extent of their problems, and their hit-or-miss approaches showed they had no real understanding of the situations they were in. In the long run, the best course for an embattled company may be to quickly own up to its errors. Then again, sometimes a company's bad acts are simply so unpalatable that its reputation is beyond the cleansing power of spin.

Sandra Bullock, Lenny Kravitz, Harry Shearer and a slew of other celebrities jumped on the bandwagon to star in a public service announcement called "Be the One," to support Restore the Gulf, a campaign to encourage people to sign a petition saying, "I demand that a plan to restore America's Gulf be fully funded and implemented for me and future generations." But when it was reported that "Restore the Gulf" was backed by major oil companies, stars started pulling their support. "Restore the Gulf" is promoted by the America's Wetland Foundation, which was reported to be a front group funded by BP, Shell, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute and a host of other oil companies. Huffington Post wrote on July 29 that the situation has created "the bizarre spectacle of the oil industry using a perfectly-named front group to solicit taxpayer assistance for BP's cleanup bill." Restore the Gulf operates "RestoreTheGulf.com," which is not to be confused with the U.S. government-run site "RestoreTheGulf.gov." America's Wetland Foundation maintains that their campaign does not seek to get taxpayers to pay for coastal cleanup of BP's oil disaster. Instead, the group wants a long-term commitment from the government to restore the Gulf's wetlands.

BP officials have admitted that members of its staff manipulated official images posted on its Gulf of Mexico Response Web site, and promised to stop the practice. The most recent photo, apparently taken from inside a helicopter cockpit, was altered to make it look as though the helicopter was flying. Savvy photo observers, though, saw part of a building that looked like a control tower in the upper left window of the cockpit, and gauges showed the door was open and a parking brake was engaged. Anomalies in the photo were identified by a reader of Gizmodo.com, a technology news Web site. Other photos were found to have been doctored as well. A photo taken at BP's Houston office showed a team of employees meeting in front of a large projection screen. The screen was blank in the original photo, but the photo was edited to add an image on the screen. BP officials explained that the photo had been edited to "ensure the detail on the projection screen could be seen" by readers. In another photo, employees are shown sitting in front of a bank of video screens containing views of underwater operations around the blown-out well. In the original photo, three of the screens were blank, but in the faked photo the three screens were filled in with images.

The U.S. Coast Guard put in place a new rule slapping journalists with felony charges, a $40,000 fine and one to five years in prison for coming too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission. Anderson Cooper of CNN says the new rule makes it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure." The Coast Guard rule prohibits vessels from coming within 20 meters (65 feet) of booming operations, boom or oil spill response operations "under penalty of law." But since oil spill cleanup operations are being conducted on most of the beaches, the rule bans reporters from just about everywhere they need to be. The new rule contradicts a statement made by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen in June, when he promised that "Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things -- if it's a security or safety problem." Anderson Cooper, commenting on the new rule, said '"Those of us down here trying to accurately show what is happening -- we are not the enemy. I've not heard about any journalist who's disrupted relief efforts; no journalist wants to be seen as having slowed down the cleanup or made things worse. If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I'd move. But to create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away from boom and boats, that doesn't sound like transparency."

BP has purchased search terms relating to the Gulf oil spill disaster on Google, Yahoo and Bing, a move some say is designed to limit the public's exposure to news reporting about the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe. BP confirmed that it has bought search terms like "oil spill," "gulf oil," "offshore oil," "Louisiana coast spill" and "oil cleanup," on the top three search engines, so that when people perform searches on these terms, a link to BP's corporate page about the spill (www.BP.com/OilSpillNews) appears up at the top of the page. The result appears with a line that says, "Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill; Learn More about How BP is Helping." BP spokesman Toby Odone explained to ABC News, "We have bought search terms on search engines like Google to make it easier for people to find key links to information on filing claims, reporting oil on the beach and signing up to volunteer." Kevin Ryan, CEO of a California-based Internet marketing company, Motivity Marketing, says research shows most people can't tell the difference between paid and unpaid search results. He says BP's efforts to divert people looking for information about the disaster to their own, corporate site is "a great PR strategy." Estimates are that the company is paying over $10,000 a day for the search terms.

News photographers are saying that their efforts to document the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials working with BP. TV crews, news reporters and photographers on the ground in Louisiana are reporting that BP and Coast Guard officials are denying members of the media flights over the oil disaster area, and blocking their access to oil-covered beaches and staging areas for cleanup. Mother Jones published a reporter's first-hand account of his repeated attempts to get access to oil-soaked beaches and cleanup operations. The most recent report of the press being denied access to affected areas came from a company called Southern Seaplane, Inc. The company was scheduled to take a photojournalist from the New Orleans Times-Picayune for a flyover on May 25, but was denied permission after BP officials found out a member of the press would be on board. In instances when access is granted, it is conducted under tight oversight by BP and Coast Guard officials. BP officials escort reporters and photographers on BP-contracted boats and aircraft, so the company decides what the media sees and when they see it.