What elephant? I didn't see an elephant.

Don't get me wrong. I love the career I've chosen. It's just sometimes I find that my colleagues are doing our profession a disservice. Take for example this week's issue of PR Week (yes, I'm a subscriber). The April 11 issue features a roundtable in San Francisco / Silicon Valley and around the table sit some of the leading lights hereabouts.

One question posed to this august group was, "So, what about the recession?" Everyone at the table, save one voice, replied, "What recession? There's a recession? I don't see a recession." The lone dissenter was Mr. Paul Bergevin, formerly of IBM and Cunningham and currently enriching the public image @ Intel. Mr. Bergevin noticed that the last time the economy went through a mild recession, there were heavy casualties in technology media.

Okay. If I were the president or MD at an agency, or the VP of Corp Comm at a company with a market cap larger than most countries in South America, I might not want to let on that the heavy rains of the economy were puddling in my front yard. Nevertheless, ... please. How credible is it for these folks who do more revolutions per minute than a carousel at Coney Island to turn away from what is blindingly obvious to most of us, even President Bush, for crying out loud.

I don't usually get worked up about what my peers say or think, but it just so happens that I know more than a couple of the people around that table and I know they are smarter, better still, wiser than this. It hurts all of our credibility when a group of very bright people don't admit there's an elephant in the room.