Is Free Speech Really Free Anymore? The PR Truth Behind Protests, Kimmel, and AI

Farzana Baduel (00:10):

Hello, hello, and welcome to the week Unspun. We have changed our time from 5:00 PM to 3:00 PM UK time. Doug, what time is that your side?

Doug Downs (00:20):

That's 8:00 AM in Canada's Rocky Mountains. So I had to get up, I had to do my hair, I had to put on my makeup. It's a whole process. It takes literally three minutes.

Farzana Baduel (00:31):

You men have no cause to complain at all. It's us who have heavy lifting in the aesthetic space. Now, the week Unspun, it is a weekly live look at the world through the eyes of PR professionals from around the world. We have an American, a Brit, a Canadian, and of course there is other parts of the world besides these three countries, but this is what we could gather at this moment. Now I'm for bad, and David, over to you.

David Gallagher (01:01):

Hey, happy to join you from sunny London just on the other side of the park and looking forward to today's conversation.

Doug Downs (01:09):

And I'm in Canada's Rockies. I'm actually in Calgary, and we know the world revolves around Alberta. We fund everything everywhere. And we're still Canadian for now,

Farzana Baduel (01:22):

For now. Now it is Friday and it's been another crazy week and we spend the week looking for new stories. Which ones are we going to pick? And every day there's just this tsunami of new stories. There is so much going on. There is so much going on. Now, I wanted to start off with spending a little bit of time on the far right London protest that happened here last week. And I wanted to hear from you, Doug.

Doug Downs (01:48):

Yeah. So to me, actually, I want to hear about that and I want to hear about your personal experience with that protest. Not that you were in it, but I know you had a bit of an experience, the Jimmy Kimmel firing, and I haven't seen the meme, but somewhere there's got to be a meme of President Trump pointing at a camera saying, Jimmy, you're fired. And the implications on freedom of speech from this. So I kind want to go down that path. It's lighten it up over here.

Farzana Baduel (02:18):

Okay, so we're going to talk about London protests. We are going to talk about Jimmy Kimmel in the US and then David.

David Gallagher (02:24):

Yeah, I got a few things and hopefully we'll have time. I'll try to be a little more efficient with my discussion this time. But I want to talk about healthcare misinformation. I want to talk a little bit about how communications directors, heads of communication are dealing with the chaos right now. We had a chat earlier this week about a proposed change to SEC regulations for publicly traded companies in the US that would go from quarterly reports to twice a year and what the implications are. And then I want to talk a little bit about the special relationship with the US and uk. And this is all from the live chat, but honestly, I'd like to hear in the comments from people who are watching the show, what they're most interested in. And maybe I can toggle the order of things, make sure we get to the things that are most actually good. But honestly, I was thinking about you all week farzana about that, about the protest and what you must be thinking personally and professionally. So for people who don't know, you're the incoming president of the biggest professional PR society here in the uk. You're a co-founder of the Asian Communications Network and you're an astute observer of the news and how it's impacting people. So I'm just wondering from a PR point of view, personally, professionally, how are you feeling? What are you thinking?

Farzana Baduel (03:34):

I mean, first of all, I thought what's quite fascinating about the London protest is that you have two very different points of view. So for instance, I'm an ethnic minority in London, my husband's white. And so we were both discussing this protest and we had a completely different perspective. So from his perspective, it was very much like it's good that we have a flag that we're proud of and we're taking a patriotic sort of stance on our country. And as Brits, we should be proud of that. And I totally agree because what I love actually about America is the flag waving. And I love a bit of patriotism, so I'm totally on that. But I was trying to explain to him that actually from an ethnic minority, we do have a different lens. And that lens is all often based upon trauma. So growing up in London, I had far right racists who would march outside my house, I would throw things through the letterbox.

(04:26):

One of my earliest memories as a child was being chased by these racist thugs. I mean I must've been I five or six and they literally had pit bull terriers. And I still remember they had this sort of uniform, this sort of green sort of bomber jacket, these jacked up jeans, black dms and skinhead. And they were British National party, national front. So my early memories is about these races that literally terrorized us ethnic minorities being brought up, and our parents had it really bad. And then we obviously were second. And I remember going up a climbing frame, I was terrified of these pitfall tarries that they put on me. And I stayed there for what seemed like hours. Of course as a child you have no idea of time and it was raining. And that's my earliest memory. So when we see the, and they often would appropriate that the sort of St. George's flag. And so when we see the St. George's flag to a lot of us ethnic minorities, instead of seeing this love and patriotism that a flag should provoke what we see is the trauma that we went through.

(05:34):

So that was a conversation I had with my husband who's white and I'm not ethnic minority. And then you often see, I think those images from the protest and you had them sort of burning the Palestinian flag and a lot of Islamophobic placard. And as a Muslim, that's really disturbing for me. It's disturbing to see the rise of Islamophobia and antisemitism. Any minority that is feeding under threat for me equally valid. And so what was quite ironic is when I was researching St. George's flag, I came across a story that actually the Saint St. George, his mother was from Palestine, and so they had both flags, one burning the Palestine flag and the other one holding St. George. And I just thought, first of all, perhaps a bit of education is required around the story and around how connected people are, where people are seeking to divide. From my PR lens, I thought to myself, take away this sort of emotional response. And I thought from a PR lens, I thought, what is going on? So what I saw was this sort of rebranding of a freedom march, A unity march, and

(06:49):

It didn't feel kind of unified to me. I mean some of the placards there was absolutely horrific in how they were just attacking. And then I sort of think to myself from an Overton window perspective of what's acceptable, what isn't. I start seeing it shift to very uncomfortable areas where you see these sort of organizations that've got very sinister end games, but they don't declare the whole end game. They start off with that thin edge of what's acceptable in the overon window, IE anti-migrant and anti-Muslim. That's in society that's just accepted now, fair game to everyone now. And then what I see is once that's been established, they move it even more and then more. And I wrote a piece in the Sri Lanka Daily Mirror national newspaper, and it was about when fear marches through London and it was a breakdown on the dark art of PR that was employed to make it acceptable for those who are having a conversation at dinner and showing how they support the march. But I think it's important to look at it holistically. I love the uk, I'm proudly British, I am very patriotic, but there is another story, and that's the untold story from my perspective

Doug Downs (08:10):

That just is completely different from what I was seeing on X because I tend to use X as like my news reel. And it was 3 million people marching through the streets of London for Charlie Kirk. That's essentially the way it played. So was it 3 million? Not that I get crowds size envy, but was it 3 million and was it a Charlie Kirk

Farzana Baduel (08:32):

Thing? Well, it was interesting because, and

Doug Downs (08:35):

You're in Hyde Park, so that's why for folks over here, this was your hood, this happened through your kind of thing. I mean, I would've

Farzana Baduel (08:41):

Loved to go and check it out myself, but there was this WhatsApp message that was going around all the ethnic minorities. I wonder if we can get it up and here. So I step outside my house other than in the morning I went for a walk and then this was just showing to all the ethnic minorities basically stay inside. And so I didn't go and see and so I followed it in the news and London that is so ethnically diverse that we ended up staying at home and worrying about, I said to my daughter, I said, I don't really want you to take public transport even though she's actually quite white passing. So she will have a different perspective than me. And a lot of my friends did feel very uneasy that day who are from the Asian or the Africa Caribbean community in terms of numbers. Metropolitan Police put it out, I think was it 110,000 or it was between a hundred, 150,000. And they have various different ways to do that. And then I saw influences in the US say, oh 3 million. And not only did they hijack the numbers into something that's completely devoid of reality, but they also change the framing to make it look like it was all done for

David Gallagher (09:52):

Charlie Kurt

Farzana Baduel (09:53):

In Charlie Chi. But actually it was all set up much earlier. And then you even have the main protagonist, Tommy Robinson, and his name isn't even Tommy Robinson. He's got rather posh sounding name and double barrel name. And he's sort of rebranded himself. And the march has been rebranded has been acceptable. So it is very much dark hearts of PR to make hate acceptable.

David Gallagher (10:17):

The only thing I would add, so I experienced this from the other side of Hyde Park. I live in the Kilburn neighborhood, which is really pretty diverse and probably more Muslim than anything else. And it's a mile away from the US ambassador's residence. So the Trump helicopter motorcade in the sky went over five or six times a day, and most people would stop in the street and wave obscene guest at the helicopter. So completely different landscape. But I agree with Ana, it was a big number, a surprising number of people out on the street for what was really kind of an extremist cause, but not the numbers that reported. And really just coincidental

Doug Downs (11:00):

Timing. So here in my hood in Calgary, right, which is a city of 1.3 million, 1.4 million, depends on how you cut it. We apparently had a, I would call it a vigil, not a protest apparently for Charlie Kirk. I saw the video. There's definitely a crowd of people with candles in Calgary. I cannot tell you for certain that that video was from September, but apparently a couple thousand people gathered. I looked all over our mainstream media, not reported in the Calgary Herald, not reported on global Calgary, not reported on CTV Calgary. And that leaves me going, honestly, if a couple thousand people gathered in Calgary, that's news. That is news. What is it about that is news. I don't care if your editor doesn't like it. So I'm left not knowing exactly what happened here. There were certainly blogs, I'd say well-known blogs that were covering it and portraying it as something that happened the previous night. My wife watched before we news every morning and she didn't see anything of it. So

Farzana Baduel (12:10):

Yeah. Before we move on to the next floor, I just want to quickly highlight a piece that just came out hours ago from PR week. So my co-founder for Asian Comms Network and Vita Patel, she just written this really important piece. So for those who are subscribers to PR week in the uk, it's about silence on racism and how it risks the credibility of our industry because it's awkward, it's uncomfortable to speak about, it's emotional in terms of when ethnic minorities have to speak about it. And I imagine it's also awkward for allies and those others who don't understand why the framing is disingenuous. So I would advise people read the PR Week article by a Vita Patel and also perhaps if you are white, speak to an ethnic minority because it'll broaden your horizon in terms of what is happening. And just like Doug, you said in your last session, everyone speak to people with different views, I think that's

Doug Downs (13:09):

Really important. Yeah, just listen, your story's amazing, and just seeing that WhatsApp note would've been terrifying. Shades of the Second World War and stay inside and crawl under your desk stuff that's horrifying. And along the lines of people speaking out, which we do have to, one of the influencers in the US with late Night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel story number two, Jimmy Kimmel spoke out after the shooting of Charlie Kirk and had a number of things to say. And of course Jimmy, his perspective is not pro President Trump. He has very negative things to say about the president. It was announced this week, I believe it's called Next Star, which it's basically the biggest network within the A BC network is taking Kimmel's show off the air through a series of outlets. And it's for him speaking out and shades of First Amendment problems all over the place here because that does come under freedom of speech.

(14:14):

My understanding, I don't watch Jimmy's show my understanding of what he said and what caused this anxiety was that he immediately said that the assassin of Charlie Kirk was connected to mega, to the mega movement. I think that's rather, we don't know everything, but I think it's rather clearly a misspeak or disinformation. But I don't think that merits taking a show off the air. Influencers do stray one way or the other for rhetoric. And rhetoric is something that we need. We need good information within that rhetoric. But taking him off the air, David, I have serious issues about that all over the place and I don't agree with Jimmy Kimmel.

David Gallagher (15:02):

Well, to be fair, I think what he said was that people on the right were working overtime to disassociate the shooter with the MAGA movement, which is not quite the same

(15:11):

Thing that he was, but maybe I've got the wrong short end of the stick of that. You might, right. But in any case, he was voicing an opinion and now he's at least temporarily off the air. He's not the first one to be taken off the air. And then we concluded with the president suggesting that anybody who disagrees with him should be taken off the air. And I think you could step outside your politics to think that's probably not a good thing for the world's biggest democracy to function. And so it causes me some alarm on a personal level and my politics aren't really a secret. So I have some questions there. But from a PR point of view, and I've said this before publicly, I think our understanding of public relations is predicated on three understandings. One is that the market could be structured, but it's relatively free commerce as part of that.

(16:07):

A second part of it is that our governments are democratically accountable, if not fully functional all the time. And probably the bedrock principles is free speech. And if any one of those three things are shifting or under threat, it makes it hard for us to really understand what our role is and to give good advice and frankly to meet our professional and ethical priorities. And I think that this series of decisions in the US from the US President has brought them all into all question. And I think that's an interesting thing for us to consider as communications professionals. Maybe tying some of this together. And I don't want to skip to the state visit the Trump state visit, but I see Eva has a comment it looks like from LinkedIn, just wondering about the different levels of coverage from the Trump state visit, I guess from the US and the uk. And I told you before the show I was not going to go on A BBC ran and I'm not going to go on a BBC rant. I did feel a little bit sick to my stomach watching the sick of fancy afforded to the Trump visit. I'm sure there are many people who felt very proud of that. So that's a conversation for,

Doug Downs (17:24):

But David, this is the King of England meeting with the king of the world. It deserves a certain amount of pageantry, doesn't it? That's how that played more or less over here.

David Gallagher (17:35):

That's a generous assessment and for the sake of keeping the conversation going forward, I won't distract us further, but just on the special relationship, I'm getting a little bit of ahead of myself, but just in the interest of time, a friend and colleague and a contributor to our chat, Adrian Monk, he used to run Communications World Economic Forum, has the best newsletter on geopolitical affairs that I've ever seen and certainly over recent months where he's introduced a new way of communicating. He does this through a newsletter on LinkedIn and Substack, but also on Threads, which is sort of the other meta platform. And he just tackles big issues from a very interesting angle. And he talked about the special relationship, which I think he called Sterling's subservience. We might even have, I dunno if we have, I think we just have a graphic from his newsletter. Definitely worth reading. And the short version, the too long didn't read version is that the UK is so dependent on the dollar in every possible aspect in its foreign policy. Obviously in its domestic policy or financial, the city and where it stands in terms of the banking industry really can't do anything without the USS approval. And so whatever special relationship is kind of only special in how imbalanced it is. And this is going to infuriate a lot of people who read it. But honestly I think it's a pretty solid take on the special relationship. And in any case, highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter.

Doug Downs (19:09):

I like Christine's comment here. Absolutely. And we see that on YouTube as well. Christine, more and more people are not so much watching YouTube as much as listening to YouTube. It's like morning shows. When I was on morning shows, we knew nobody was watching us. They were listening to us. They were using it as background. That's perfect.

David Gallagher (19:30):

I don't want to take you off Jimmy Kimmel too fast. I did kind of want to maybe take us into more industry conversations. Obviously we try to stay tight with what's going on in the news, but I loved your podcast this week with Jackson on generative ai. I thought it was Jackson White, timely. It's been the subject of 10 different webinars I tried to attend over the last week. I just wonder if you could summarize a few highlights, if you got any surprises from that conversation far

Doug Downs (20:00):

You want me to go?

Farzana Baduel (20:02):

I mean, first of all, he calls himself the Minister of Propaganda. Nice. Which I thought was very slick and very smart. But over to you, Doug, because this is an area that you are

Doug Downs (20:13):

The thing. So Jackson was really dealing with artificial intelligence and bots scraping the internet. And he started by telling us, look, 51% of internet activity now is bots. It's not humans. So the bots have taken over in terms of volume, who is scraping the internet? And that's beginning, that's obviously influencing search engine optimization. I thought the solution that he pitched that really caught my attention was to build two websites for clients. One is a webpage for humans, just like we see right now, SEO optimized and increasingly answer engine optimization optimized because more and more we're searching using chat, GPT. Even Google is giving us results based on answers that we want. So it's all shifting toward a EO. But he said build a second website that's coded specifically for bots who have different personality and they don't have personality, but they do have personality, so to speak, and want different things because the reality is that your website's success is increasingly dependent on how much the bots like you. And that was the big takeaway for me from what Jackson had to say.

David Gallagher (21:33):

Well, just as a listener, and again, I do try to catch each episode as they drop every Tuesday on your favorite podcast channel. I took a couple of points away from that one, Farzana, you asked the question in that scenario, would you need to start developing different streams of content for the different AI platforms? Which hadn't occurred to me. And I thought his response was probably, and I thought that was interesting. I also didn't know you pronounced it Claude. I've always pronounced it Claude. So that was a learning from me

Doug Downs (22:03):

From philanthropic.

David Gallagher (22:04):

But on a bigger point, he seemed to be suggesting that where AI is going is unknown right now. And I thought that's the right approach to take. I've heard a lot of people saying, this is what's happening. This is exactly what you need to do, jump on the bandwagon now. And I think he was saying start experimenting, start getting comfortable with this and maybe think about this in a much bigger level that the changes might be systemic, not just incremental. And I just thought it was a balanced view. He seemed to be mostly optimistic about the opportunities, but not too naive about some of the risks. So stories and strategies. Great podcast episode. Awesome. Can I just talk a little bit about some of the things that came up in the text chat that we're all part of, and for those who don't know about it, curate a WhatsApp chat.

(22:53):

It's got 1200 people around the world, almost like correspondence, just showing, posting what they think, what they are interested in. It might be of value to the rest of the community. There are 20 different chats going on at any given time, and it ranges from arts and culture to sports and entertainment to policy and politics. Giant chat on ai, another job chat. This is also just kind of a barometer of where things are going and then a lot of things in between. It's impossible to pick the right things. I just picked what I thought was interesting. So here are a couple of things that caught my eye. I've been interested in misinformation, disinformation since before it actually had a label. I was cool in that space before it became cool to be in that space. But I have found it fascinating, especially in healthcare. And a contributor, Sonya Collington attended event, sponsored, hosted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, big thinker in global health and had a few takeaway points from that conversation.

(23:56):

And if we could pull up, I see it, it's the recap. So Sonya was quoting Sander Vander Linden, he teaches at Cambridge and he's one of the thinkers in this space about how to pre bunk misinformation. And this concept has become pretty popular as a proactively defensive measure to battle misinformation. And he's got three things here. One, you got to be proactive. It always beats being reactive. So by the time the issue is out there, it's too late to catch up to it. So you can kind of anticipate what's going to be said and take the air out of it. The idea that stories change minds, not facts. And I think that's something that we've talked about on this show. And keeping your messengers as local and relevant as possible. So can't do the whole show or the whole conference justice, but I thought this was an interesting thing. By the way. I try to post links in a newsletter summary to all of these stories. So we're going really fast if you want to go further on that. There was another conversation about the communications director, the chief communications officer. This came from an IPSOS report, the reputation council report. They just issued for 2025. I can't remember what it's called. The Eye of the Storm I think is what it was called. And it was how strategically communications directors are recommending silence as the way forward to deal with some of these issues. Strategic,

Doug Downs (25:21):

Isn't that avoidance? What do you think of that? When I hear silence, I think avoidance. But I get why.

Farzana Baduel (25:27):

Yeah, self preservation, which I

David Gallagher (25:29):

Get. Yeah. Earlier we talked about the need for the industry to speak out about racism, which I a hundred percent agree with. Many things industry should speak out against. But then what is the industry, if its components are compelled to be silent, what is the industry? Just a few points from that report. Council members, these are communications directors who contribute to this report. I think there's 150 of them. So most of them said they prefer, sorry, they should not speak out on the divisive issues. And this is a deliberate decision. And then that gets sort of what does this mean? There's this idea that ceo CO has a role to play in shaping business strategy and it should be built around purpose, but I don't know. I don't feel entirely comfortable with this. It does still,

Doug Downs (26:25):

The CEO of Disney ran into an issue about a year and a half ago when L-G-B-T-Q issues came up and they didn't speak out. They stayed silent on it. And eventually the CEO of Disney had to apologize. Quoting you needed me to step up and say something at point in time and I didn't, and I got it wrong. So especially with Gen Z, sorry, gen Z, gen Z, especially with Gen Z, they want you to take a stand.

David Gallagher (26:56):

They

Doug Downs (26:56):

Want to know what you're about before they care what you know.

David Gallagher (26:59):

Yep, yep. Well, we're not going to have time to get into this last thing, but you and I talked about this earlier, Doug. The last comment I wanted to make was just about this proposed SEC change should publicly traded companies report quarterly as they're required to. Now this is in the US or two times a year. And the quick summary of that chat, some people said that's just a recipe for shenanigans. Other people said, actually it would relieve the workload. A woman named Charlotte, Wes Newman, who works in this space said, actually, it might not be a bad idea, but quarterly reporting is probably the way to go to keep us on track, to keep the tough questions in front of us and keep us accountable. And I think that's kind of where I landed on this too. I could see the arguments either way, but it feels like the status quo is probably one two,

Doug Downs (27:42):

I think it puts a burden on PR pros. Just because you have fewer reports doesn't mean you have fewer stories. Something's got to fill the narrative. So more news releases, more analyst calls, probably more social media, tire pumps, PR pros either become the guardians of trust or the spin doctors of silence. Yep. Yep. Well said. Well, last week, the horn agrees. I got a horn there in approval

David Gallagher (28:07):

Last week. You had some sage advice. We were talking about some pretty tough issues, especially around the Charlie, Kurt murder. And you suggested that we all go out and find somebody we disagreed with and try not to persuade them, but just listen. So I did what you said. I talked to two MAGA people who I disagree with. It didn't go that well, but it didn't go that badly either. And I did learn a lesson in trying to listen and not speak. So here's my, if I can do this, this week, my suggestion for the weekend is get offline if you can. I know we live online, we're having this conversation online. Maybe after you've downloaded this episode and shared it, get offline. But honestly, get outside. If you can go to an art museum, if there's one around, read a book, watch a film, just turn out the lights if you have to. But I'd say at this point in the week, it's probably good to get offline. So that's my words of advice and I a week

Doug Downs (29:09):

Without blue screen. Yeah.

David Gallagher (29:10):

Yep. That could be great. I know you're off to New York next week. Yeah. You'll be at the UN General Assembly, is that right?

Farzana Baduel (29:19):

Yes, I am. I'm going to fly out tomorrow.

David Gallagher (29:21):

Fantastic. Well, I'm sure people will be looking for you on the streets of Manhattan. You'll be on the show next week, right? You'll be back.

Farzana Baduel (29:28):

Absolutely. Yeah, I'll be

David Gallagher (29:29):

There.

Doug Downs (29:29):

Great. Safe travels. Well, that's it guys. That's all time we have today. Hope you enjoyed as much as we did. Special thanks as always to Gold Star producers Emily Page and David Jedi, the week on sponges, a co-production of KRS in Public Relations Stories and Strategies, and F Gate Advisors. If you'd like to join the Advisory Club mega Chat, please get in touch with David directly on LinkedIn. Next time we'll put up a scroll for his personal cell number and feel free to call any time

Farzana Baduel (29:58):

And he's addressed. Just turn up

Doug Downs (30:00):

Exactly. He'll answer. See you next week. Have an awesome non blue screen weekend. Bye guys.