FIR #454: When the Media Rewards Spectacle Over Substance

Mar 10, 2025

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At the now-infamous press conference that turned out to be an orchestrated ambush of Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Real American’s Voice correspondent Brian Glenn lobbed a hand grenade of a question to Zelenskyy. That single question was emblematic of an entire shift in the way the media works, requiring a comprehensive rethink of how public relations practitioners prepare for a media environment in which engineered outrage is rewarded by the press because spectacle earns more clicks than substance. In this short midweek episode of For Immediate Release, Neville and Shel break down the many implications for the practice of PR and the actions required to prepare brands to be targets of the same kind of treatment Zelenskyy got at the hands of the leaders of the free world and the complicit media at the press conference.

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The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 24.

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Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (2): [00:00:00] Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 454 of four immediate release. I’m She Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. I’m sure almost every listener to this podcast has heard about the extraordinary encounter between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on the 28th of February with US Vice President JD Vance.

During the argument. Here’s what happens. A Rightwing journalist, Brian Glenn, questions, Zelensky choice of attire, rather than focusing on war or democracy during a press conference alongside Trump and Vance, why wasn’t he wearing a suit? They wanted to know, this wasn’t an offhand remark, but a calculated attempt to manipulate perception.

Demonstrating how mainstream media today isn’t just about information, but about controlling narratives. In the post on LinkedIn last week, mark Bukowski highlights a fundamental shift in pr, media, [00:01:00] and public discourse, illustrated by the seemingly trivial but strategically loaded question asked of Zelensky by Brian Glenn setting the scene for an ugly ambush on the unsuspecting zelensky by Trump and Vance in front of an assembly of journalist reporters and TV cameras.

As Politico described it, Trump advanced both turned on the embattled Ukrainian wartime leader during a remarkably tense exchange accusing zelensky of failing to express sufficient gratitude for US involvement and overplaying what they said was a weak diplomatic hand. Bukowski argues that the media landscape has fractured, no longer functioning as a singular town square, but as a collection of information silos shaped by algorithms, AI driven amplification, and engagement driven clickbait.

Traditional pr, once focused on managing reputation and discourse, is now deeply entangled in a performative attention economy that prioritizes spectacle over substance. Trump [00:02:00] exemplifies this shift by not just controlling messaging, but orchestrating the entire conversation, selectively choosing which media outlets get access and ensuring that only those who play his game shape.

The narrative this Bosky warns is a crisis not just for pr, but for public discourse and truth itself. If pr, media and politics are now entangled in a world where attention is weaponized communicators and industry associations must take proactive steps to adapt and uphold credibility. I. So she, how do you see it all?

Where you sit in the us?

Shel Holtz (2): Yeah, here in the US this was all anybody was talking about for a few days. But I didn’t look at it from the PR perspective until you shared this Mark Bakowski link in our Slack channel, and that led me down quite a rabbit hole. I started dissecting all of this in terms of the implications for.

Public relations and communications. You [00:03:00] touched on a few of them. Certainly. There’s the fragmentation of the media ecosystem. We don’t have a town square anymore. We have silos. They tend to be driven by echo chambers. And those echo, echo chambers are driven by algorithms. Organizations trying to reach broad audiences have a problem.

So that’s one thing to consider. That’s also something that we were aware of. There’s this shift from message control to conversation control that I teased out of Marx. LinkedIn post we in PR typically sought to manage a message and shape public perception. That’s the role of public relations.

Now, as Mark suggests in the article, some figures don’t just control the message. They control who gets to ask and what conversations dominate. You referenced that as well in terms of him picking which media get to. Report on him in person blocking AP and Reuters because he doesn’t like them.

Then there’s [00:04:00] this notion of performative media. In pr we used to focus on crafting narratives for traditional media. But today’s media as characterized by this reporter’s question was an example of spectacle over substance and the fact that the media. Reported on that shows that it works.

The heckling that Zelensky got from Trump and Vance and some of the press in the room wasn’t about getting an answer. It was all about engineering outrage. So what does this mean for reputation management? Do pr people need to get ready for performative attacks on their executives, on their brands?

I don’t have answers to these things. These are questions that, as far as I can tell are just emerging now. But I think a couple, I

Neville Hobson: think they, they have to prepare for this kind of thing. Oh yeah. There’s no

Shel Holtz (2): question they have to, but how is a question.

Yeah. There’s also the suggestion in the article, the truth is devalued when attention is the currency. Now we’ve all known that attention is the currency. [00:05:00] With the rise of social media in its current form with its clicks and its ads and the way the Facebook and the rest of them make money.

How do you balance engagement with integrity? There’s this pressure to win the attention game that, does that lead us to continue to prioritize clickability over credibility? This is another. Issuer, I think we have to weigh the two sides and make some decisions and implement some processes.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. I think you mentioned when I interrupted you earlier about how the, how I utterly agree therein lies the huge dilemma for communicators because we could come up and indeed I do have a laundry list. These are the things we need to do this. It doesn’t have the how I. For instance, one of ’em I’ve got here is about prioritizing media literacy and narrative analysis amongst your communication team.

So it talks about train the teams to identify and contract disinformation tactics, recognizing when narratives are being manipulated. Great. How do [00:06:00] we do this regularly. Audit media sources, influencers of credibility for engage. That’s an easy one because I’m sure many are doing that now too.

But some of these things I have to admit are almost common sense. Champion fact-based storytelling, for instance e emphasize accuracy over engagement aligned storytelling with verified sources. And that probably gets, I think, to the. To the heart of the matter on the how. And there are some things that we are, I think overall collectively, many communicators are a bit lax on which is a thorough verification of sources.

And so you are not, if you are encountering a situations such as the a the outcome of that event in the White House and you are gonna report on it, you’re gonna look at who’s saying what about it, you . Probably got more work to do to verify your sources because anyone with an opinion is posting including in the mainstream media where they might not be as, as thorough in their verification procedures as they could be quoting some, even some [00:07:00] papers.

But I’ve seen blogs mostly with unverifiable. I was gonna say facts. They’re not facts. I say their opinion and most of ’em aren’t. So again, that just makes it even more essential to do your due diligence properly when you’ve got this kind of situation that you’re trying to address.

That’s one, one area. Another

Shel Holtz (2): area to consider is that going forward Zelensky going into a meeting with Trump will probably be anticipating this type of an attack. And I think I. Brands and leaders should do the same. Manipulated narratives are going to become a routine tactic in competition, whether it’s in the political arena or the arena of commerce.

So do we need to shift toward narrative defense strategies in a media landscape where . Bad faith actors are manufacturing this kind of outrage. If we continue to do as Mark says in the LinkedIn piece focus on [00:08:00] influencer fluff and corporate vanity metrics, we won’t be ready for these.

No. And it is pretty clear that in this kind of immediate landscape, those kinds of attacks are coming. And we have seen the things that start in the political realm. Migrate their way over. We saw that with DeepFakes, for example. First they were in, first they were in entertainment with ridiculous and just fun stuff.

But then they went into politics in order to. Make you think you were hearing or seeing a politician who never said or did what you heard or saw. But now it’s affecting business. So far it’s mostly, phishing attacks and the like. But we’re seeing this particularly with the ai Yeah.

Generated stuff. I think there needs to be a shift in the focus of what PR is working on if we wanna remain relevant and. Prepare content that helps us when these kinds of manufactured outages are targeting . The business.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. [00:09:00] Yeah. I think projecting this out into a business situation it, it had got me thinking when I was thinking this through myself even about how would you, how do you anticipate, let’s call them weaponized PR tactics by the other side, let’s say and have yourself prepared for that.

How do you do that? We’ve now have a clear indicator of what that looks like. The Trump Vance ganging up on Zelensky, so it wouldn’t be difficult to project that out to, for instance, your a PR agency pitching for a client’s business. And this. This also I guess clearly shows how the age of politeness has diminished entirely.

Where before if you disagreed, it’s polite disagreement. Here you’ve got a situation where it’s outrage and it’s anger. It’s vulgar and it’s, the effing and the blinding language going on that in polite conversation you never had. That’s changed radically. And that’s now common currency.

Look at any TV program, a series, a topical series on anything. And the f word is [00:10:00] almost it’s it’s occupying now the space as, oh damn we, we all said many years ago, and that was a rude word, no longer. So all that has shifted radically. So that is your environment. You are making a pitch.

And beforehand what might have happened is that the other side, if they didn’t like it wouldn’t say much, but you’d tell after you’d done that, they weren’t that impressed. Now they tell you in extremely strong terms that you’re full of. You know what? How do you anticipate that? That’s actually not too difficult.

So I place that under the heading of Anticipate weaponized PR tactics and that. Is part of that, you are in a pitch and that’s the response you’re getting. How are you going to address it? Are you gonna say anything about it afterwards? And this is another thing the kind of traditional non-disclosures and privacy elements are now questionable whether people will observe those.

So you gotta assume that NDA procedure we had many years ago ain’t gonna, ain’t gonna work anymore. So you’ve got to take that into account. So the environment has shifted. [00:11:00] If you then look at a product launch media invited, they’ve been told not to, embargo until so and so that I’m afraid I would place no trust in anyone obeying that anymore at all.

Shel Holtz (2): I. You remember Andrea Beckley and her civilization efforts to bring civility back into the public online commons. She must be despondent over the state of things right now.

Neville Hobson: The politeness thing I wrote a post the other day about are you polite to an AI when you’re talking to a chat bot?

And I argue the case as to why I saw that you should be. Yeah. And I am. That’s I say please, and thank you. Sure. I do all the time. So that’s where we’re at. And this is under threat to all these behaviors by the likes of people like Trump and his supporters or Hisense, whatever you want to call ’em.

And people take advantage of that too. So you’ve got a landscape that is extremely. Difficult to truly understand based on the rules [00:12:00] we’ve been following for a long time. And this reflects, I see big headlines in some of the tabloids here in the uk. Trump has overturned the world order.

He has, frankly, he has. And we have to accept that there’s no, there’s probably no going back on anything now until Trump’s gone. But his legacy is gonna be that this is actually gonna be the norm for quite a while forward, I would say.

Shel Holtz (2): Just to come back to the PR implications of this. Sure. A couple of additional thoughts.

One is that there may be some people who work in media relations or public relations who are watching Trump and wondering if the things that he is succeeding at are worth emulating. And I’m looking at, as we’ve already discussed, his control of message through controlled access. Is there something that

PR people are going to take away from that. Are we going to start to think that we should be controlling who shapes public discourse about our brand, about our products about our [00:13:00] organization? And I’m not sure that’s the best tactics to adopt in pr, but there may well be some people who are considering that.

One other thought and that’s what I saw, an article

Neville Hobson: one. One quick comment on that before we move on is that then presents an opportunity for professional associations to really show their value. Sure. Revise their codes of ethics, advocating for responsible media practices public education campaigns, or media literacy, for instance.

Just a couple of things. Supports. PR training for this kind of thing but also

Shel Holtz (2): advocating for open access to your. Content. You’re not going to tell what a media outlet? No. We don’t like the way you report things, so you can’t

Neville Hobson: cover us, yeah, that, that actually was truly stunning when the AP was banned.

But they don’t seem to be too alarmed themselves about it any longer after the initial, what kind of thing. So it’s happened, but it still could happen further. So it is to do with that control. This is getting a [00:14:00] bit like. Oh, dare I say, it’s Soviet Union Days. I mean it’s extraordinary.

Shel Holtz (2): One other article crossed my feeds and it’s tangentially related to this.

And I think this is a communications unintended consequence that maybe Trump and Vance didn’t consider. And if you’re planning on engaging in some of these kinds of tactics it’s a fair warning. That this kind of communication might follow. Now, this happens to be on a substack of somebody that I have never heard of before.

He’s a Holocaust historian. But this was making the rounds. He wrote a piece called Antisemitism in the Oval Office, and it is a rather lengthy and very well documented. Essay that essentially says that the attack on Zelensky was an anti-Semitic attack. Now I didn’t see that. I saw the press conference.

I saw it while it was happening. Is he Jewish zelensky? Pardon? Is he Jewish? Zelensky? Yes. Zelensky is Jewish. Okay. [00:15:00] Yeah, definitely. But what this guy is arguing is essentially that if you look at the laws. That were implemented in Nazi Germany at the beginning of the Third Reich? Not, yeah before they started hauling people off to concentration camps where they were just trying to marginalize the Jewish population in society.

It was exactly the same criticisms that were being leveled. Its zelensky, the way you dress and things like that. And he documents this extremely well. Yeah. And this is making the rounds. And if it’s. Gaining traction among populations that are opposed to antisemitism. And you listen to the Trump administration talk about its efforts to STEM antisemitism.

A lot of this at universities, which I really think is just targeting universities, finding an excuse to target universities. . But you’re gonna lose some support among some of the people who have been supportive. Thinking through what people might [00:16:00] say or might do as a result of this action that, you’ve been looking at what we get out of attacking Zelensky what do we pro prospectively lose should be another consideration.

This goes back to something I. Talked about years ago, which is in the communication strategic plan, we should have a step that just before launch, we close our eyes. We project six months out into the future after we have launched whatever it is that we’re going to launch and say what went wrong. It was a tremendous failure.

Why what failed and anticipate consequences that you hadn’t anticipated before.

Neville Hobson: There’s something that just popped into my mind, a news story I saw this morning about empathy and how Trump and Musk demonstrate with their words and their deeds, a complete and utter lack of empathy. And the article paralleled that with what happened or what was happening in Nazi Germany.

At the same time of the period you are talking about. So I’m thinking we, [00:17:00] we would like to see more of this kind of comparison being made. It’s alarming frankly, because I think there’s a lot of people are gonna say, you know what? I think they’re probably right. These guys are like that. I dunno what that says for where we go from here.

Shell, frankly, but this is not as usual. That’s a fact.

Shel Holtz (2): Oh, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. Count on that, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

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