Regarding the comments about the lawyer trying to incite a social media storm, I think there's another element to this as a PR nightmare: traditional media running with the story. Remember, the news media themselves fly far more often than Ma and Pa Kettle. They have seen enough instances where they've been ticked by airline staff and policies, and want to use their bandwidth to try to shame the airlines into providing better service. After some recent incidents and the general downward trend of service culture across the entire US industry (save maybe the UA GS/AA CK/DL 360 types), I don't blame them.

That said, after the Dao incident and everything Munoz committed to after his initial lousy response/proverbial PR beating-into-submission, you'd think UA would have enough control over their own staff to get the memo out (and followed) about being on absolute best behavior right now to regain public trust. Even if every bin on the plane was already full and given this pax was on a BE ticket, if what we're hearing about the agent is even half true, there's a lot the agent should have done differently in communicating with the pax.