No doubt financial pressures would make it hard to live by these standards, in addition to the pressure from other corporate constituencies. When crisis management plans must be implemented in a matter of hours, management would hear conflicting advice from various quarters such as marketing urging acceptance of responsibility for the reasons you note, legal and risk management urging caution lest the company jeopardize insurance coverage or its position in future litigation and finance concerned about preserving short term margins. Some modern corporate liability insurance policies even have crisis management endorsements whereby companies can recover the costs of retaining crisis management consultants (so long as the company retains an insurer-approved “crisis management” firm). In cases where companies turn to their insurers or their lawyers for assistance with crisis management, it is likely pre-ordained that the short term interests of risk management will win out over the longer-term interests of brand preservation.

One problem for brands is that they may not have enough time to do some actual investigation before it hits the blogs. Which makes your points all the more important.