As the United States gears up for a significant presidential election, the political climate has become an omnipresent factor influencing journalism and PR strategies.

David Fuscus, CEO of Xenophon Strategies and founder of Précis AI, shares some insights on navigating the complex landscape of political communications in an increasingly polarized environment.

David emphasizes the need for public relations professionals to be strategic in their approach, understanding the risks and ramifications of engaging in political discussions. He highlights the importance of being intentional in decision-making, using case studies like Tractor Supply's misstep with their ESG policy to illustrate the potential pitfalls of being tone-deaf to the current political climate.

David, Abbie, and Adrian also discuss the evolving media landscape, where the traditional boundaries between old and new media are blurring, and advise on leveraging niche publications and trade press for more effective outreach. They emphasize the necessity of staying informed and adaptable in a fast-changing world.

Key Takeaways

• PR professionals must counsel clients on the importance of strategic and tactical decisions, especially in politically charged times.
• Companies should be aware of the political landscape, especially during election cycles, to avoid unintended controversies.
• The media environment has evolved significantly, necessitating a nuanced understanding of both traditional and new media.
• The PR industry’s focus has shifted from purely earned media to include a significant portion of social media and niche publications.
• Businesses must be prepared for unintended political entanglements and understand how to manage crises effectively.

About the Guest

David Fuscus is CEO of Xenophon Strategies, a Washington, DC based public relations agency that he founded in 2000. Xenophon works with clients from around the world such as Airbus, The Virgin Group, The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Coast Guard and NEC Corporation. Fuscus wrote his first press release for his parents restaurant when he was 19 and he’s been a PR professional ever since. In 2023, he was one of two inductees into the PRSA Hall of Fame and was the President of the Public Relations Global Network that same year. Fuscus is also the CEO/Founder of Précis AI which recently launched Précis Public Relations, a generative AI platform highly specialized for PR and marketing.

About the Host

Abbie Fink is president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. Her marketing communications background includes skills in media relations, digital communications, social media strategies, special event management, crisis communications, community relations, issues management, and marketing promotions for both the private and public sectors, including such industries as healthcare, financial services, professional services, government affairs and tribal affairs, as well as not-for-profit organizations.

PRGN Presents is brought to you by Public Relations Global Network, the world’s local public relations agency. Our executive producer is Adrian McIntyre.

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From the Public Relations Global Network, this is PRGN Presents. I'm Adrian McIntyre.

And I'm Abbie Fink, president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona, and a founding member of PRGN.

With public relations leaders embedded into the fabric of the communities we serve, clients hire our agencies for the local knowledge, expertise and connections in markets spanning six continents across the world.

Our guests on this bi-weekly podcast series are all members of the Public Relations Global Network. They will discuss such topics as workplace culture, creative compensation and succession planning, the importance of sustainability and environmental, social and governance programs, crisis communications, and outside of the box thinking for growing your business.

For more information about PRGN and our members, please visit prgn.com. And now, let's meet our guest for this episode.

Hi, I'm David Fuscus. I'm the CEO of Xenophon Strategies in Washington, DC. And we are a 25 year old public relations agency. And I'm also the CEO and founder of Précis AI.

So here in the US, we are about to elect a new president of the United States. And politics and political discussion has been dominating the airwaves and newsprint for several months now.

And those of us that work with clients that are playing on a national stage regularly are paying attention to what's happening. But politics adds a different context to the types of conversations that are happening and what's happening in our newsrooms around the country.

And you've been working in that space for a long time.

Long time.

You know, it's not so much about just talking about it. It's really impacting how we're talking and the decisions. We're guiding our clients around these types of discussions.

So what have been some of your observations over the last few months?

There's a political divide out there in the country, and politics are getting a lot of attention.

And when it comes to journalism, attention means people are tuning in, people are watching, people are reading, which means ad sales, which means money, which comes right back around to where's the focus of the newsrooms that are out there? And the focus today, and it will be through the 4 November is on politics.

And so much even for businesses and organizations that would not consider themselves political in the sense that they're issue based or particularly involved in things that are impacting the community.

But we can't help but be political in an election year certainly the decisions that are being made and things that are happening are gonna impact any type of business and any type of organization.

So how should we, or can we be smart about the way that we interact with those discussions, recognizing what our colleagues in the newsrooms are going through, and be of value in these discussions, if that's an appropriate place for us to be?

And then if we are, how do we guide those conversations so that on November 5, when the election has been decided, sometime shortly thereafter, that our business continues to be in a good position?

Well, as PR professionals and counselors to organizations, I think that we've got to urge our clients to be very strategic, and very strategic on what their decisions, what they're doing, very tactical on the things we're undertaking, especially with earned media. There's actually danger and risk out there for companies for doing things if they ignore the political conversation that's going on in America.

For example, Tractor Supply, I grew up in a very rural area. Tractor Supply is a publicly traded company that sells, not just ... they don't sell tractors, but boots, whatever, everything you can think of as kind of an all in one store. A few weeks ago, they came out with an ESG policy and were kind of tone deaf to the fact that ESG has become a political hot button issue.

And they were pulled into it. They got pulled into it. They were attacked on social media. They were in the process of becoming a real poster child.

Then they pulled their policy and kind of took themselves out of it. But that was kind of a case of them stumbling into something that's political.

So we have to be very good in counseling our clients to really think about the possible ramification of various decisions that are being made, because, let's face it, 98% of the cases, companies wading into politics and taking political positions does not end well for them.

Well, and there's a real difference between intentionally participating in the process and companies that are pledging support or publicly making statements that have chosen to be in that conversation. And then there's those that end up in it by the nature of being commented on or somehow or another got interconnected into a political discussion.

That second one might be a little more complicated to navigate because we did not necessarily anticipate or plan to be part of a political discussion.

And so maybe we aren't able to completely stay out of it, but we need to have some, you know, be able to provide that guidance, you know, and it put crisis communications into that mix. Whether we're talking about politics or anything else.

I mean, that's really where this potentially falls, is that it's just anticipating what issues might impact your business. And how are we going to respond, you know, as a large brand or as a small, local, community based organization?

Things are happening around us that are going to impact the business.

Oh, yeah. There's no question about it. But I guess overall, one of the key things is when you're doing something, do it by decision. Right?

So I was working with, when Roe v. Wade was first overturned with a company, a shoe company based in the Pacific Northwest, and they were coming out with a policy for their employees that if they were in a state where they didn't have access to abortion, they were going to provide funding and move them over.

Yeah, they took some hits on that, but they went into that eyes wide open, and they did it by decision to go in and do it because it represented very much in line with the values of the company.

They also engaged public relations professionals, crisis professionals, which would be us at Xenophon on this, to go in, gauge risk and help them get through it, not to counsel them, not to do it. They were definitely going to do it. But how do you manage that process overall?

Just kind of, you shake your head sometimes when you get companies that stumble into things that they're not doing things by decision.

Well, I think that's a very valid point in that our role is not necessarily always to ... we may not be there to tell them do it or don't do it.

We're there to tell them what happens if you do or you don't and analyze what the potential outcomes were. And I think this can apply outside of the political structure as well.

Anytime that something might be happening and your business has made a decision to take a stand, be vocal, say something.

We have to understand what the potential risks are in doing that both, you know, externally to our client or our business audiences and as well as internally. Right. What will impact will those outward decisions have on the people that work with us, on our teams?

And are we willing to stand by that throughout the entire process? Because you make a statement, if you can't stand by it, should you have made it in the first place?

Absolutely.

I mean, you know, companies overall, when they're looking at things, can stumble into things, but, you know, you know, part of our job as communications counselors, especially working in a crisis situation, is to put risk in context for them so they can make decisions on. They can make decisions on things.

David, let's zoom out for a second and just see if we can't characterize some of the macro trends here, I think your perspective would be particularly interesting. You've worked for decades with the media in a variety of different roles. You've been an industry spokesperson. You've worked inside political campaigns. You've worked as an advisor and a PR professional. So you've seen things from a lot of different points of view.

Sure.

But what you've seen has significantly changed. The media today is not the media of the eighties and nineties.

So there's a lot we have to at least acknowledge. The ownership structures of major news organizations, not just in North America, but everywhere around the world. The decline in newsroom budgets and staffing has put pressure on individual reporters to deliver in a very competitive environment.

People are still trying to have careers in an industry that has a lot less spots for them these days. The rise, of course, of other platforms where people communicate directly with audiences.

And of course, the increasing polarization that we've seen as algorithms have shaped what people see and the kind of information bubbles that they're in.

And the rest of the world, of course, going through its own versions of this, as there's a resurgence of far right parties in many places, there's a difficulty in finding the facts on particular topics. We've moved from an information economy into an outrage economy at some level. This is a minefield for people of all kinds.

So how do you characterize where we are and kind of how people need to think about what's going on and how that changes their strategy?

First of all, I've been around long enough that PR was earned media. The two words were synonymous. Obviously, that's not the case. Not the case anymore. That is out there.

But I was just in Britain about a week ago, and there was a whole set of riots that lasted for seven days. It started out with a person who was indeed an immigrant going in and attacking people in a dance. At a dance school, kids at a dance school.

And this then sparked riots from people on the right, anti-immigration on the right. And that was largely fueled by a great deal of misinformation that was out there.

People were getting outraged about things that just weren't occurring. And then as the flip side of that, after that, there was big demonstrations across Britain that were anti racism. And that's all part of the.

That's going on, part of the ecosphere of media today. Right? You know, sometimes people talk about old media or new media. You know, there's no old media, there's new media.

I mean, we all know there's just media, right? There's social media. You know, it's an interconnected ecosphere, and people need to be aware of that.

I mean, you know, stories and news can start in social media and move over to earn media. Earned media can move over to social. It's just this ecosphere where things flow around.

And an important thing for clients to understand is you've got to look at this globally. And nothing is more important now than in election year. We have this big political divide of looking at the forest and not the individual.

Not the individual trees.

Well, and that, you know, that global view is somewhat difficult for some organizations is it's not something that we would necessarily always be thinking about, but the impact of what is happening here and how it resonates elsewhere and things that are happening outside of our country and the view that we get from that, from what we're consuming from a media perspective, and we are in this place right now, the news is created by, really, anyone that has access to a platform. It is not necessarily maybe old versus new or traditional.

It is not only left up to those with the names that we might recognize, really, anybody with a platform now can be considered and is considered media. And where we are working, our advice to our clients is no longer just in the daily newspaper or the six p.m. newscast.

It's really across a variety of different platforms that are out there to, you know, sharing their information, their viewpoints, their opinions on particular topics. They're not neutral in the same way that they used to be used.

As I said earlier, it used to be that earned media was 100%, right, at least at Xenophon. And my guess, Abbie, is you've probably got some similar numbers earned media. For us it's probably 25 or 30% of our overall business now. The rest is social and all these other things that you do in the modern world.

But because this is for the Public Relations Global Network, it's important to recognize that the politics in the US also have an impact around the world. And the best example of that is, I mean, a good example of that is concern in Europe about NATO.

I can tell you I've got for Précis AI, the other company I run, we have eight employees in Ukraine. They are incredibly worried about lack of funding and things from NATO.

You know, things that are going now in the election campaign here really do have the attention of people, of people around the world.

There was an assumption for years that a professional communicator had a professional journalist as her counterpart, and that the relationship between those two was somehow foundational to the whole thing. And of course, as you say, earned media has shrunk as a piece of the pie for a PR and communications firm.

But there's also questions, some legitimate, maybe some not legitimate, about the status of professional journalism these days. Certainly there are charges leveled against all news is fake news, and that's not accurate.

But there are certainly disinformation outlets that are actively seeking to undermine things.

My concern here is more for journalists working for the known outlets, the ones that you would think of as "the media" in a traditional sense, who are being pulled somewhat into the more scandalous, the more clickbaity thing, whether they're aware of it or not, because of the pressure to perform dwell time and clicks being the business model now of their organizations. Is it harder for folks to find someone who wants to report straight information, straight news?

I don't think it's that difficult to find people that are in good journalists that would report straight news on things. But the question is, you have a smaller universe of stories that you can pitch out there, stories to get printed today or aired. They need to be sexy.

There needs to be an emotional piece to them that can appeal to people for clickbait. Of course, there is a tendency when you're looking to put emotion into a story that will get people to click, to hype things up a bit.

But I still think there's plenty of good, honest journalists. One of my junior staff asked me a year or so ago and did I respect journalism because I've worked with journalists for 35 years and yeah, absolutely.

Of course, after working in all those years, some of my closest friends are journalists.

What do we need to be doing? How do we get ourselves prepared for what this looks like? What do we need to be? What kind of resources are out there for us?

What kind of advice and recommendations and counsel should we be bringing forth to our clients? We know this is happening. The election, the outcome of the election doesn't end when the president is named and inaugurated.

It's going to continue at least for four years, till the next cycle. So how do we get ourselves ready and how do we respond and be prepared over the next several months and then into the future?

Based on where we are today, I think there's a number of things that we have to do is that, number one, be smart and research-based on what you're doing, what your outreach is going to be, know who you're pitching to understand by going in and looking at what reporters have been doing over the last few months. Is it there beat? Well, their beats always going to be multi issues, multi areas. But is there politics? Have they been pulled into politics at all?

And I think that it'd be very clear the role of creating communications vehicles is even more important now than it's been.

The old adage that journalists loves nothing more than paper, even if it's electronic paper today, but paper of letters or reports or whatever, the thing is something that they can put into the story. So creating communications vehicles around your story is important to get attention to it.

We do a lot of public affairs work here at Xenophon, so we do a lot of white papers that organizations issue, and then we use that as the basis for earned media in social media. But communications vehicles can even be podcasts. It doesn't have to be a white paper. But go and know who you're pitching.

Really understand it helps you gauge the risk of it. Second thing is creating communications vehicles, so you're pitching something that's newsworthy.

And the third thing is, something here we're doing at Xenophon is we're trying to go smaller in our pitching. By smaller, I mean to more niche news organizations, industry based news organizations, instead of doing larger.

We've always worked a lot in the national media. And right now I'm telling you, to get anything into the national media that's not either political based or breaking news is very, very, very difficult.

So whatever industry your client is in is really leaning into the trade press that's covering it, the people that aren't going to be that interested in politics overall. So you've got to be careful, you got to be smart about it, and you've got to go out with news to the right reporters.

Thanks for listening to this episode of PRGN Presents, brought to you by the Public Relations Global Network.

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