BP's mess is multifaceted

It may have taken three months for BP to put a spigot on its broken oil pipe in the Gulf of Mexico, but executives had no trouble putting control valves on the flow of public information all along.

Managers of any company, especially those at global giants such as BP, are especially keen on managing when things go unmanageable. BP is no exception. It behaved in this time of trouble like the behemoth it is — big, slow and far more interested in the perceived damage to its name than the real damage from the fact the poor, disaster-plagued Gulf was now being drowned in crude oil.

BP couldn't cap the well that had suddenly somehow moved beyond the laws of plumbing. Beyond belief and common sense is that BP apparently didn't do due diligence of determining the risks after lancing that pool of crude five miles below the surface.

BP was far more out of its depth on land. It had the benefit of the public's doubt — it's an awful mess, but BP's doing its best. Except that it wasn't. It was doing its best to plug the gusher of bad press, and now it's got something worse than nasty ol' crude oil floating to the top and mucking things up. BP, perhaps intentionally, misstated the scope of the problem from the first. Now come doctored photos of BP engineers looking at three blank screens at the company's oil spill control center. The screens were doctored to make them look as if they were displaying underwater shots.

Next came news that the company is linked to the release of a Libyan man convicted in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

For all the effort of damage control of the worst oil spill in history, the company seems to keep losing it, and their assurances that they'll handle it are now as believable as an "End of Road Work" signs that line I-15.

Capping a well is a tough proposition, especially for one that took nearly defying nature itself to install to begin with. The headache is the hangover of a public relations approach not only gone wrong but completely avoidable.

Johnson & Johnson, which almost lost its own kind of money-making resource — Tylenol — back in 1982 when someone laced some extra-strength capsules with cyanide.

The company's reaction was an immediate recall of every bottle followed by the reintroduction of Tylenol in tamper-resistant packaging. Tylenol went from having 37 percent of the market to 7 percent in a couple days. Johnson & Johnson put people's safety in front of its financial concerns.

Painkillers are not crude oil leaking like a severed femoral artery, but following Johnson & Johnson's example could have saved BP a big headache: Tell the public everything you know as soon as you know it. Reverting to fear of stockholder returns fizzling might feel like the right thing to do, but not being upfront when things go bad for a company can ruin a lot more than someone's portfolio.