Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Boeing Company President and Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg, right foreground, watches as family members hold up photographs of those killed in the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610 crashes, during a Senate Transportation Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 29, 2019.
Geezer that I am (well, budding geezer), I like my news on paper. I subscribe to four print dailies (The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times). See Trees v. Meyerson, pending in the Court of Environmental Obloquy.
In any event: Today, the same full-page ad ran in all four of those papers. It read, in full:
We mourn those whose lives were lost on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and offer our deepest sympathies to their families and friends. We will always remember. 29 October 2018 / 10 March 2019
From all of us at Boeing
Touching. But why, you may wonder, did this ad run today? Because it’s the one-year anniversary of the first crash?
Turns out there’s an even more compelling reason. Today, a Boeing executive—and not just any executive, but, actually, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg himself—will appear before a House committee to answer questions about the crashes. This will mark the first time a Boeing honcho will have come before Congress to respond to the many questions raised by the increasing revelations of Boeing’s neglect of the safety warnings it received from employees about the devices it was installing on its 737 MAX jets.
At a time when newspapers and magazines are dropping like flies, the Boeing apology blitz suggests there’s a largely untapped revenue source for financially challenged publications: corporate apologies. Boeing must have dropped some hundreds of thousands of dollars on those ads: chump change for Boeing, to be sure, and a nice bundle but nothing special for publications as flush as the four I read. But a full-page apology could surely boost the fortunes of smaller publications, though compelling corporate miscreants to make sectoral apologies—running such ads across the journalistic spectrum—would take some doing.
Still—just think of how many major corporations need to make apologies. PG&E. Facebook. Google. Amazon. Wells Fargo (actually, Wells Fargo has been running apology ads for years). The list goes on and on.
Consider this an Ill-Gotten Wealth Tax. The Guilt to Gelt Pipeline. America’s CEOs, your country is calling you.
