Episodes

Callaway spent three days saying it was disappointed by an ad. Then its CEO admitted Callaway approved that ad before it was posted. This episode is about the gap between those two statements, and what a company reveals when it comments on its own conduct as though it were in the audience for it. A content warning first: the episode discusses domestic violence as an image used in a golf brand campaign. Nobody in this story is accused of real-world violence. The scene was staged. What two compa...

Three parties could have spoken about Hayden Panettiere. One had ten years with her and said nothing. One had ninety minutes and wrote her a letter. One was her mother. This is an episode about standing — proximity plus obligation — and what each of them did with it. Since her death roughly 800 articles across 400+ outlets have named Neutrogena alongside her, 79% of them negative, zero carrying a statement from the brand and fourteen written specifically about the absence of one. Days earlier t...

Brad Pitt gave Esquire a Monday. Molly McPherson breaks down what he actually bought with it. The September cover profile reads like an ordinary man letting a writer into his house — the dogs, the Perrier, a charcuterie board he builds himself. Molly walks through what each of those details is doing, why the drinking line was volunteered rather than asked for, and why a story that spikes and vanishes inside a week is exactly the outcome a reputation reset is aiming for. With Dr. Abby Medcal...

A self-help influencer with nearly nine million followers is being sued by her own business partner, who is also one third of her marriage and, according to the filings, the person who wrote her books. That is the story everybody is going to tell. It is not the story worth your time. Molly's read is narrower and harder to shrug off. The throuple is not the crisis. The lawsuits are not the crisis. Nicole LaPera — The Holistic Psychologist — built a brand on one asset, and it was not her writing....

The CEO of Cracker Barrel lost her job this week, and the tell was sitting in an interview she gave months earlier. A year after the logo backlash — the one that generated a wall of press, then a second spike now, bookending the whole affair in Muck Rack's data — Julie Fels Masino is out. She did not need to be. Almost everything she decided was right. That is what makes this one worth your time. This is not a story about a dumb company doing a dumb thing. Cracker Barrel was right about the num...

Taylor Farms got the apology it wanted. The FDA told the company that one iceberg lettuce product from Central Mexico had a “confirmed positive” cyclospora test, then said the next day it had made a mistake and the result was a false positive. As of the FDA's own account, no positive product test for cyclospora has been identified. Taylor Farms then built an entire statement around that apology, led with it, and left the people who got sick in the last paragraph under "our thoughts remain." Tha...

Justin Baldoni hadn't said a public word in almost two years. Then last week he propped up a phone, sat down next to his wife Emily, and posted a video to his own Instagram — no publicist, no People magazine. I told NBC News the most strategic thing about the video is how unstrategic it looked, and in this episode I show you the receipts. I walk through every move the way I teach my own clients: the owned-channel play (stop fighting Meta's algorithm — bring the crisis to your channel), the o...

Molly stood in the back of a Maine town hall, watching an oyster farmer from Sullivan hold a room with no notes, and texted her kids that they might be looking at the state's next senator. On Monday morning, her algorithm fed her story after story about the same man — now a loser, a liar, a warning. This episode lives in the space between those two feeds, because as Molly puts it in the first fifteen seconds: a crisis begins before the headlines. By the time the video goes viral, the conditions ...

This one was ripped straight from Molly's morning. A client in the middle of a professional crisis that went viral and personal - social media vigilantes mobilizing online, a position lost - and the conversation kept landing on a single question: when someone types your name into a search engine in June 2026, what actually comes up? Google? Social media? A Reddit thread? Or an AI-written answer you never saw coming? Linda Zebian, VP of Communications at Muck Rack and a ten-year veteran of N...

This week the stories all share the same fingerprint: people who think the rules don't apply to them. Crisis-communications expert Molly McPherson breaks down why the Mike Vrabel–Dianna Russini saga still has legs months later (hint: it's not the affair — it's the contempt), how the New York Times investigation exposed a reporter who called the paper's own CEO to kill a story, and why the American Diabetes Association's apology is the rare crisis that actually got *better*. Plus: a Lego-store...

Five scientists were escorted out of a diabetes conference by police for handing out a scientific paper — published in the host's own journal. By the time the American Diabetes Association finished explaining itself, its president and president-elect had resigned, and the editorial those five hoped 200 people might read had 76,000 views. Everyone is covering the removal. Molly is covering the two statements that came after it — the apology that blamed the people it was apologizing to, the peace...

A 37-year 60 Minutes correspondent got fired in a conference room over a dinner he refused to attend. Scott Pelley lost his job and won the PR war in the same week, and the side that was supposed to be running the institution handed him the moral high ground in writing. Everyone is covering the firing. Molly is covering the two dueling statements, the word "performative" in a termination letter, and the moment CBS made it personal while Pelley kept it strictly business. Chapters: 0:00 — The Ci...

When a Senate campaign gets hit with a sexting scandal, the spouse is supposed to disappear. Amy Gertner grabbed her phone, walked into a cloud of Maine blackflies, and recorded the most effective crisis response of the cycle. Everyone is covering the Wall Street Journal texts. Molly is covering the betrayal underneath them, and the moment a candidate who built his brand on owning his record reached for the worst page in the 2026 crisis playbook. Chapters: 0:00 — The Reddit Bomb That Finally ...

A New Jersey congressman has been missing for 77 days. His office keeps posting like he's at his desk. His father is fielding press calls. And almost no one is talking about it. Tom Kean Jr. hasn't cast a vote since March 5. His team's answer? "Personal medical issue." "Back soon." "Trust us." That's not transparency. That's a cover-up with better branding. This episode breaks down the four things Kean's team is doing wrong, why "simulated presence" on social media erodes trust faster than si...

When a celebrity files a lawsuit citing harassment and a hostile work environment, her PR team is supposed to make her the sympathetic figure. Blake Lively's team did the opposite. Everyone is covering the lawsuit. Molly is covering the PR collapse underneath it, and the numbers tell a story the legal coverage is missing entirely. We dissect: Why the "grab your friends, wear your florals" press tour was a five-alarm fire from week one How cross-promoting Betty Buzz during a domestic violence ...

What do a Patriots head coach, a country legend, and a Hollywood power couple have in common? They all just gave us a master class in what trust actually is. Or isn't. The thread connecting this week's stories is the difference between managing a message and actually meaning it. This week's roundup isn't about three scandals. It's about one question every leader eventually has to answer: Did you tell them the truth, or did you tell them what you thought would work? The cases: Mike Vrabel and t...

When a presidential interview goes off the rails, it is rarely an accident. It is a pattern. A man tried to kill the president on Saturday. By Tuesday, the dominant news story was a court filing about a ballroom. That is not a glitch in the news cycle. That is a Trap working exactly as designed. This week, I am introducing the fourth Trap in the Crisis Doctrine. The Deflection Trap. The four-move playbook leaders run when they cannot afford to answer the question they were asked. I pulled 8,7...

When a leader is under pressure, the first move tells you everything. Kash Patel sued The Atlantic for $275 million. Mike Vrabel called it a "private and personal matter." Both responses were designed to control the story. Both made it worse. This week on PR Breakdown, two leaders, two crises, one shared mistake. They tried to outrun trust instead of rebuilding it. Molly Breaks Down Why Kash Patel's $275 million lawsuit against The Atlantic is the loudest possible signal that the story landed ...

When serious allegations land, a public figure's opening move is supposed to signal steadiness, accountability, and command of the facts. Eric Swalwell's first move did the opposite. Within hours, he reached for lawyers, labeled his accusers politically motivated, and went rogue on Instagram against his own staff's advice. The first move told us the intent. Everything that followed confirmed it. This isn't a story about one congressman's resignation. It's a diagnostic for how contempt ...

Melania Trump didn't walk to that podium to defend herself. She walked there to distance herself. From Epstein. From the male executives around her. And quietly, unmistakably, from her husband. This wasn't a press conference. There were no questions. No reporters. Just a controlled, produced, lawyer-crafted statement delivered at exactly the right time to own the news cycle and put narrow legal points on the record before something drops. In this episode, Molly breaks down the full PR read ...

Two coaches. Two losses. Two press conferences. Same signal. Villanova's Kevin Willard threatened to fire his staff on live television, doubled down in the post-game press conference, then called it a joke when the backlash hit. UCLA's Mick Cronin dismissed a reporter's question, called it the worst he'd ever been asked, then accused him of raising his voice — on camera — in front of a room full of people. Neither apologized. Both made the questioner the problem. That's not frustr...

Your reputation isn't being shaped by what you say anymore. It's being shaped by everything everyone else says, organized by AI, before you've had a chance to respond. Crisis communication has a new first mover, and it isn't you. Molly McPherson breaks down the shift that most leaders still haven't internalized: waiting is no longer a strategy, it's a surrender. Using the TSA staffing crisis and Delta's response as a real-time case study, we look at how AI aggregates noise into narrative, why...

What actually breaks first in a scandal? Not the headline. Not the viral clip. Not the backlash. It's trust. In this episode, Molly McPherson breaks down three stories where trust was fractured long before the public ever reacted. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos keeps inserting himself into the news cycle while Nancy Guthrie is still missing. Oprah scores a viral interview with Kristin Cabot and misses the only question that matters. And ABC's The Bachelorette production collapses under the w...

Molly McPherson opens this episode not with a scandal, but with a pair of pants. It’s a disarming entry point into a much bigger question: what happens to trust when an expert starts to monetize? Drawing on her own decision to join the affiliate platform LTK as a mirror, Molly unpacks a real client crisis involving a content creator whose audience turned on them—not because of what they did, but because of what had quietly eroded. This episode introduces the Crisis Doctrine, Molly’s new framewor...