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The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson
Ever wonder what's really happening behind those viral headlines and celebrity PR disasters? Step into the war room with crisis communications expert Molly as she dissects the week's biggest reputation battles, media meltdowns, and brand controversies.
Each week, Molly peels back the curtain on headline-making moments to reveal the strategic chess moves that shape public perception. From corporate crises to celebrity comebacks, she breaks down what works, what fails, and what it means for the future of reputation management.
Whether you're a PR professional, business leader, or simply fascinated by the art of reputation management, join Molly every week for the conversation everyone in PR is talking about. Subscribe now to master the strategies shaping modern reputation—one breakdown at a time.
The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson
The Secret Trigger Behind Every Crisis
This is the only thing you have to fear in a crisis. Listen as crisis and reputation strategist Molly McPherson explains what is at the heart of every crisis.
Recorded late on a Friday— moments after her meeting with a client in crisis— Molly checked out the national news headlines looking for a Friday news dump. She wanted to find the common theme between what she heard on that client call and what that headline story revealed.
She found it.
Learn what the secret trigger of every client crisis.
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Do you want to know what is at the root of every single crisis, every single crisis? This is the silent trigger behind bad choices, missteps and cascading failures. By the end of this episode, you are going to have my secret for how I help every single client get through their crisis. Hey there, welcome to this episode of the PR Breakdown. I am your host, molly McPherson, and this is a different episode. It is unscripted, it is raw, it is coming off the cuff from the top of my head, because I had video footage that I could share with them of a consumer base that was activating against the client. Many people hire me to help them through a crisis that has a backlash element. Their stakeholders are retaliating against them. I help people work through that, but the only way I can do it truly successfully is if the organization or the person who's hiring me you know at the center of it understands the root cause of the crisis. If they don't understand it, buy into it, believe in it, they won't get through the crisis and, in fact, it will linger or it will abruptly end along with their job. That's what I find happens, and it's not because I'm some brilliant strategist. I'm just playing the odds and I'm playing human behavior.
Molly McPherson:I've worked in media my entire career. I've worked in communication, I've worked in news, I've worked in public affairs. The funny thing is I've never worked in PR, and everybody knows me for PR. I've never worked in PR ever. I've worked in a segment of PR. I mean, crisis management is PR and I considered, you know, communication, jobs, pr. But I've worked through many, many, many crises. Now I consider myself a crisis and reputation management strategist, because people hire me when they are going through a crisis and I help them through this.
Molly McPherson:I'm going to reveal the secret that is straight out of my playbook too. If you need a playbook, I've launched my Indestructible PR Playbook. Why Indestructible? You can fill in the blank right there, but this is my secret playbook. You can fill in the blank right there, but this is my secret playbook. This is what I do to get through a crisis and what I'm talking about today is in that playbook.
Molly McPherson:So we have some Friday news dumps that I'm going to reveal from the headlines today. Before I reveal the secret trigger behind every crisis. I want to give you some examples. Today is Friday and technically it's Friday afternoon, so I opened up the newspaper to see if I can spot any Friday news dumps, the stories, the interviews, the drops that happen on a Friday in the hopes that the press doesn't pick up on it. Let a couple days go by so they don't have to deal with it, and then, hopefully by Monday, something else will happen to distract the press. Something else will happen to distract the press. One big one is staring right at me. It's also a topic that I talked about on a podcast a couple weeks ago and that's the story of LA Mayor Karen Bass. In my podcast I talked about the breakdown in leadership and why it happened. And this story, not only a Friday News dump, but also has that silent trigger.
Molly McPherson:To bring you back to the LA wildfires. I'm sure many of you remember seeing stories about the LA mayor. Certainly there were questions about her severe, severe weather alert. The conditions were ripe for a wildfire to happen. Despite the warning, she got on a plane to go to Ghana to attend a presidential inauguration. She knew what could happen in Los Angeles and that did happen.
Molly McPherson:While fires broke out around Los Angeles and certainly throughout California, someone took a photograph of Mayor Bass at the inauguration at a cocktail party. At the same time, the fires were out of control in Los Angeles. That's bad and that's bad PR. That is a crisis, los Angeles, that's bad and that's bad PR. That is a crisis she had to scuttle back home quick, quick to get back to Los Angeles, to lead the city through this crisis.
Molly McPherson:As she was flying back and I don't remember, like I said, this is off the top of my head, unscripted podcast I think it was a 17-hour flight I, I think I remember doing the math and I wrote that in the podcast. It was a 17-hour flight. She had 17 hours to come up with a response. When she left the plane, as she was disembarking the plane onto the jetway, a reporter came up to her with a camera microphone and started asking her questions when were you? What are you doing? The mayor stood there, deer in headlights, deer in headlights, literally and figuratively cornered, and it showed. It's devastating footage, absolutely devastating.
Molly McPherson:So the mayor goes to Los Angeles and appeared press conferences, interviews. The target was on her back. An adjacent story that came out about this, because in a crisis, people are always looking for well, why did we get here? People were starting to scrutinize the fire department and it was revealed that there was budget cuts to the fire department and other sectors within the city, but the fire department took a big hit. The fire chief, kristen Crowley, pushed back, you know, against those cuts and today, friday, february 21st news, the fire chief was fired.
Molly McPherson:Mayor Bass said see you to Kristen Crowley. Now she did interviews with Fox 11, mayor Bass. So now we have the reputational tour where she is trying to reclaim her reputation. This is the part where she's trying to restore trust, which I don't know how she's ever going to do that. She's essentially pinning the blame for her being in Ghana Well, not only to President Biden. She's claiming that President Biden asked her to go to Ghana at his behest I don't know why an LA mayor, he's the president, not sure why, but that's what she's saying. But she's clearly deflecting blame for this trip. But she's clearly deflecting blame for this trip.
Mayor Karen Bass:And so she said, quote I felt absolutely terrible not being here for my city. When I say it was a mistake, absolutely, the idea that I was not present was very painful.
Molly McPherson:That's ambiguous, right? It's ambiguous because it's painful to the people of Los Angeles when your mayor is gone and she's at a cocktail party, but what she's revealing there is that it was painful to her. It was painful that she wasn't there, so you can tell that she's deflecting.
Mayor Karen Bass:When the White House called and asked me if I would represent the president, I said yes, it was going to be a very, very short trip over a weekend and two business days. It didn't reach that level to me to say something terrible could happen and maybe you shouldn't have gone on the trip.
Molly McPherson:She's deflecting by blaming other people for not telling her that she shouldn't go on that trip, that the city wasn't prepared, and who did she pin that on? She pinned it on the person who was speaking out against her. It doesn't wash at all. Okay, here's another story. I don't even want to spend that much time on it because I've talked about it ad nauseum, as have many, many others. The Hollywood Reporter came out with this week, I think today, a cover story illustration of Baldoni and Blake Lively, using a David versus Goliath theme. I used the same theme in, I think, my very first interview about this back in December. I said it's a David and Goliath story. However, I had Justin Baldoni as David. It appears that Hollywood Reporter had Blake as David, if I'm getting that right, because she had the slingshot right. That's supposed to be David.
Molly McPherson:The silent trigger is all over that story as well. Silent trigger is all over that story as well, even though the civil complaint filed on a Friday news note Blake Lively filing it against Justin Baldoni and Justin Baldoni being absolutely thrashed all weekend. He felt he was being taken advantage of by Blake Lively and we come to find out later, her husband. Now why? The silent root of the crisis. I would say the reason why all this happened is because Blake Lively's husband was filming a movie in Canada and other places and he was away while his wife was filming a movie with a very, very handsome co-star. So there again the silent trigger. Here's a quote from the Hollywood. So there again the silent trigger. Here's a quote from the Hollywood Reporter that also shows the silent trigger.
Molly McPherson:As a veteran personal rep puts it, what was an industry of helping and protecting and elevating people is going to change. The whole sheen has been tarnished in a way that's not justified because there are a lot of great publicists doing a lot of great work out there. Okay, we're getting closer to the silent trigger. And when I did interviews for Blake around the Blake Lively Justin Baldoni story, I didn't want to. I was busy. Also, it was the holidays. I didn't want to do any press at all. But what was starting to gnaw at me was the narrative of the story being anti-publicist, anti-pr, anti-crisis managers and also saying that publicists are crisis managers when they're very, very different. But it bothered me. I was worried for my industry. That's a hint. Let me do one more story.
Molly McPherson:Oh gosh, elon Musk cutting 9-11 survivors fund. Republicans joined Democrats in rebuke the World Trade Center health program. A 90 member staff was reduced about 20 percent, about 20%. So they cut the 9-11 Survivors Fund. What does that create? What does it create for you?
Molly McPherson:Are you someone who sees what the Department of Government Efficiency is doing to national parks, to departments, to so many agencies out there? Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. What is happening to a lot of people in the federal government right now? They're losing their jobs. How does that make them feel? That is at the heart of what I say. If you understand this one element of a crisis, of when I say if you understand this one element of a crisis, it explains why people make these fateful decisions. It is because of this reason and that reason is because they're scared. It's fear. They're scared of exposure, they're scared of loss, they're scared of failure. Almost every crisis comes from those feelings. It just depends on the sector.
Molly McPherson:My client today who indulged me. I was so grateful to this client that they allowed me to show footage of their consumers very upset and coming together and there was video footage of them explaining why they were upset. My client and senior leadership. They were looking at this group in the same way that almost every client I deal with. When they hire me, people hire me for backlash. They all look at that group who activates the same way. They're the opponent. Sometimes they're the enemy. They're often labeled as horrible people. My client wasn't doing that, but was definitely labeling them as a mob that they were causing a lot of disorganized chaos, if you will, understandable.
Molly McPherson:I played clips of the consumers talking and I said listen to what this person's saying. What about this person? What about this person? They allowed me to go through all these clips and I asked what do you hear? What do you hear? And it took a while to get there. And this is a very, very smart person and a very thoughtful person and empathetic person. That's why I knew I could do it with this person.
Molly McPherson:It took a while. They're worried, they're frustrated, they're angry. All the words I went no, no, no. We're getting closer. And then they said it they're afraid. I said if someone's afraid, what's that emotion? And they said it fear. That's it. It's fear.
Molly McPherson:Fear is at the heart of every single crisis. I've been doing this for a long time. Every single client who hires me. They're hiring me out of fear, no matter what position they have. Someone is scared and someone is scared of something. Decision makers are often afraid of being exposed and sometimes it's wrongdoing, definitely but sometimes they don't want to be exposed as vulnerable, or they don't want to be exposed as incompetent, or they don't want to expose why they made the decision that they did, because it's just going to raise more questions Again. At the heart of it fear, fear, fear. Why did Mayor Bass fire her fire chief? Because that fire chief, kristen Crowley, was speaking out against her. She was fearful of losing her position as mayor. She had the power to get rid of that fear, though I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it's going to work at all. What do you do with the city that's under the threat? Fire, oh, I know you fire their fire chief.
Molly McPherson:If there's any lesson and this is for anyone who works in comms PR crisis, but also anyone in life, anyone listening to this in the sound of my voice that can hear me talk about this in a very unscripted, raw kind of unorganized way and my apologies for that unscripted, raw kind of unorganized way and my apologies for that but whether it's a reputational or an operational crisis, the source is always the same, and that is fear. Find the fear and you find the path to resolving the crisis. That's my hack. It's straight out of my playbook. At the beginning of the playbook, I always set the stage when are we going? What's our mindset? How are we thinking? Who are our stakeholders? We do stakeholder mapping, then we do a little empathy mapping.
Molly McPherson:I want to know who has influence. Who has power? Who has high power, low influence? Who has all the power, all the influence? Who can make things happen to the client? Remember, if you view groups and people as adversaries, beneath that, many times it's just fear. And even if you're dealing with big advocacy groups and they could be incredibly disruptive and they can be incredibly frustrating too like a well-organized advocacy group, they could be fearful of what could happen to animals, what could happen to the environment, what could happen to the planet. Find the insecurity, find the fear and you're finding your way through the crisis. That's all for this week on the PR Breakdown podcast, where I break down the crisis and the situation to reveal the root cause, to help you protect your reputation in a crisis. Thanks so much for listening.
Mayor Karen Bass:Bye for now.
