2025: A PR Year of the Flying Monkeys
We may still be plugging along in the Year of the Wood Snake in the Chinese Zodiac, but as far at the PR industry goes, it seems we’re stuck in the Era of Flying Monkeys.
As we all slide into the final weeks of our final month in 2025, I can’t help but reflect on how many things changed for me this past year.
The PR industry is a dynamic one, but sometimes, that’s also just a nice way of saying that it’s fraught with overwhelming challenges (negative ones) and conflicts (by definition negative). It can be a very tough sector.
I came to know far more about the root-cause of many of those challenges just this year… and believe me, some of the insights weren’t pretty.
For example, here on my blog, I reported information about:
- U.S. PR industry association PRSA leaders having known full-well in 2021 that they operated a “hostile work place” due to their own internal self-admitted misconduct, but they hid this information from members while continuing to point fingers at me for all their problems, on total disinformation and false claims;
- PRSA actively co-opting my own collegiate alma mater at UT-Knoxville into their gross displays of misogyny and adoption of a highly politicized DEI agenda (with the help of Omnicom’s Ketchum PR firm);
- The Omnicom / Ketchum PR agency multinationals’ documented history of politically targeting me by using both U.S. and U.K. PR industry associations as front groups. Can anyone say, “Arctic Frost / Part Deux”?
I also gathered far more insights this year about Ketchum’s (Omnicom’s) little-publicized role in the U.S. Department of Justice’s May 2023 Durham Report, which exposed a past Ketchum senior VP (Charles Dolan, also known on the X platform as “Chas Dolan” under the @cathal1066 handle) for his reported role in what is now widely known as the Trump / “Russia Collusion Hoax.”
I only discovered this year that a separate former Omnicom / Ketchum exec (U.S. expat) in London (and former PRCA and ICCO chairman) — who personally invited me in 2020 to co-chair with him the PRCA Global Ethics Council — not only employed Mr. Dolan for Ketchum’s work for Putin’s Russia, but he also has enjoyed casual online chats with Mr. Dolan, on such heart-warming topics as the finer points of uber-affectionate fatherhood:
I mean, wow. Mr. Dolan even agrees in Russian!
Mr. Dolan (@Cathal1066) was mentioned hundreds of times in the DOJ’s Durham Report on origins of the Steele Dossier targeting President Trump, while Omnicom’s Ketchum was mentioned just under 10 times, by name. That’s because Ketchum was the PR agency of record for nine years for Vladimir Putin, during nearly all of the Barack Obama Administration while Hillary Clinton was in post at the U.S. State Department:
Source above / U.S. DOJ FARA Filing by Ketchum (2008): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/5758-Supplemental-Statement-20090131-10.pdf
Holy Espionage, Batman!
Sure wish someone had told me all this prior history, back in 2020!
Or, that someone with the multiple Omnicom-owned PR firms then represented on the PRCA Ethics Council (Ketchum, Fleishman Hillard) or with a past history working on Ketchum’s Russia PR account but in 2022 was employed elsewhere while serving on the Ethics Council (Milk & Honey PR) had disclosed to the rest of us in 2021-22 that Omnicom’s Ketchum was then known to be under U.S. DOJ investigation as tied to the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane“ inquiry.
Alas, they did not. Instead, certain members of the Council were too busy pointing fingers elsewhere. It’s a lot to unpack, for sure.
And it’s one of the reasons why today I had a long phone chat with a PR friend of mine, on the hideous problem in the PR industry of these swarms of “flying monkeys,” defined in pop culture as follows:
My friend and I lamented on just how often the “flying monkeys” tactic is deployed by certain bad operators in PR, for egregiously disinformation-driven purposes.
It’s highly deceiving of many otherwise good people. It inflicts serious harm, on purpose.
The worst of it is when someone is made a “flying monkey” for a bad actor… and they don’t even know it. I truly believe this has happened to me across recent years, with Omnicom being the direct beneficiary of it.
This misconduct needs to stop and be called out. And we need to educate the industry far more carefully about the warning signs of these antics, so that good people can be aware and therefore avoid being an abuser by proxy or an abused victim by proxy.
Source below / Workplace Bullying Project — “How a Narcissist Does ‘Abuse by Proxy'”
To cut through some ambiguity here: the head-on ethics collision of 1) the PR association world and 2) the PR multinational agency / conglomerate world remains in a state of one, long, multi-year chain reaction, of implosion upon implosion. It’s a truth that’s become increasingly difficult for me to stomach, given how much I myself have been targeted and victimized by it.
In the New Year’s Predictions department, I don’t see the “flying monkeys” situation getting resolved anytime soon.
And sadly, until those issues get rectified (and the people doing real harm are held accountable), I deeply believe our industry will remain caught up in the glut of toxic, undisclosed self-interest and, yes, even self-dealing by some who are willing to go there.
We must do better. So that’s the glass-half-empty part. Here’s where the glass is half full:
This year, I took stock of hard facts and difficult information, and while I emerged from the other side of that process with more than my share of battle scars, I also have a clear strategy for moving ahead.
I can report that I’m closing out the year with these status points as well as accomplishments:
• As always, I have my antennae calibrated to learn what the 2024 financial year held for the longtime ethics-embattled Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). After all, since it’s nearly 2026 already, it sure would be interesting to see those IRS 990 tax filings for 2024 for both PRSA and its DEI-focused PRSA Foundation… if PRSA would only release them! It’s not only a “Disclosure” violation of PRSA’s Code of Ethics to fail to report financials; it’s also a violation of law. The extended deadline to file for 2024 was a month ago, yet strangely, PRSA staff apparently aren’t responding to legal requests for the Form 990 documents. This situation proves yet again that even as quickly as the PR industry is moving, there are some dinosaurs and old habits that will never change.
- My research focus in 2025 on organizational gaslighting is soon to yield new fruit with a published white paper, led by an academic research team at the Global Strategic Communication Consortium. My colleague Dr. Shannon Bowen worked wonders in establishing a strong research foundation for this ethics issue in PR, with a literature review completed earlier this year. Stay tuned for the published research and more discussions in 2026! And many thanks today for the shout-out by David Olajide of Curzon PR (and Farzana Baduel) on their blog about the issue of organizational gaslighting overall: https://curzonpr.com/theprinsider/organisational-gaslighting-why-communicators-must-confront-a-growing-threat-to-employee-trust/
- I deeply enjoyed and appreciated my PR speaking engagement travels this year to Croatia, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic, to expand international conversations on PR ethics topics – with the organizational gaslighting research leading the way. One of the best aspects of my some 30-year career in public relations is seeing and experiencing the wealth of knowledge and passion for our field by others. There are so many high-quality individuals in our field, who truly care about one another and about our sector’s future.
- I owe profound thanks to Johna Burke, global managing director of AMEC, for providing pathways of sponsorship to allow a burgeoning group of PR students from around the world to attend the annual AMEC Summit. Over the past two years, I’ve been pleased to provide funding to pay for online registrations for student attendance at the Summit. The 2026 Summit is set next May 18-20, in Dublin, Ireland. I urge our entire global community to get those speaking slot proposals in early (deadline is January 31, 2026) and those full registrations confirmed for the 2026 budget, because this conference is best-in-class for PR data and insights.
- Many thanks to all of my colleagues – including my co-hosts, PR strategist Jared Meade and author Melissa Carter – who took part in our second year of The #PRethics Community on LinkedIn. The Community provides an informal discussion forum for exchange of ideas, resources, research, case studies, and leading-edge issues in PR ethics. We do have plans to transition all of the video discussions collected to date into a for-real podcast 😊, so please stay tuned for that. Thanks are also in order to Orla Clancy and Mike Klein of Strategic, as well as Mike’s forum, #WeLeadComms, for their kind support and content development chops that they’ve graciously extended to The #PRethics Community.
What’s in store for 2026?
I have some meaningful advocacy efforts and new projects in the works (including new research), and I’m anticipating a major announcement during the course of the New Year ahead. Apart from that, I’m enjoying life in the great Volunteer State of Tennessee and working hard to change the world in ways that I hope make it better for future generations.
I wish everyone a lovely holiday season and prosperous 2026!
Mary Beth West is a Tennessee-based public relations leader and founder of The #PRethics Community on LinkedIn.