Everyone understands the importance of shaping a story but few are as shrewdly proficient at manipulating the media as L.A. crisis manager Mike Sitrick, who the Los Angeles Times called “The Wizard of Spin.” A celebrity, arrested for soliciting a prostitute or going on a drunken rampage, confronted with a frenzied pack of reporters, is likely to call Sitrick whose firm has defended and rebuilt the reputations of scores of entertainers, athletes and other high-profile clients caught in the media glare. (His clients have included Paris Hilton, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Vick and Chris Brown to name a few, as well as embattled companies and high profile executives, many of whom Sitrick can only discuss off the record if at all.) Sitrick, whose uncanny ability to assess and understand the intricacies of how the media behaves and what makes an individual journalist tick, has a lot to teach anyone about how to deal with the media. His advice in a nutshell: “If you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you.”
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Mike Sitrick”