The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson The PR Hits, Misses, and Face Plants You Missed This Week
This week’s episode gives you a front row seat to my Friday live sessions, where culture, crisis, and community collide in the best possible way. Think of it as a sampler plate of reputational highs and lows. Some hits. Some misses. A few absolute disasters. And plenty of sharp commentary from the people who show up ready to spar.
We dug into the stories bubbling across media, politics, entertainment, and news.
Here’s what we got into:
• The tightening screws around Pete Hegseth and the trip wires Trump keeps casually laying in public.
• Signal Gate, and why the smallest digital habits always tell the biggest story.
• The American Eagle campaign, Pantone’s baffling color of the year, and the new era of rage bait.
• Spotify Wrapped’s identity crisis, including why the app suddenly thinks everyone is eighty.
• The Lizzo Substack pivot and why her cancellation narrative leaves out the part that actually mattered.
• The Belichick and Jordan Hudson saga that refuses to stop producing plot twists.
• Erica Kirk’s full rebrand tour and what happens when an influencer decides to shed the bling.
• The royal chaos machine that somehow keeps spinning even when no one is asking it to.
• The early contenders for 2025’s best and worst crises, including a few names the audience threw in with real enthusiasm.
If you want the unfiltered version, join us live next Friday. Right now, the streams run through Substack, but soon you’ll be able to watch on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. The room always warms up fast. The opinions never stay polite for long.
Until then, pay attention to what people actually react to, not what the talking points tell you. That’s where the truth hides.
If you work in strategy or communication, join Molly on December 17 at 12 PM ET for a 60-minute live media training that breaks down a crisis in real time. RFK Jr is being hit from two sides at once. Now Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir is out, weeks after Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay landed a punch. We'll walk through the headlines, the data, the sentiment, press coverage, then map out what a competent response would actually look like. Click here to attend.
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