Are Leaks Strategic PR Tools or Signs of Corporate Decay?

This week, we look into the murky ethics of media leaks and their growing role in shaping political, corporate, and cultural narratives. From leaked peace plans that spark international diplomacy to budget details released minutes before parliamentary debate, we dissect whether leaks are ethical whistleblowing or manipulative PR tactics. 

Farzana argues that leaks often reveal broken internal cultures, while Doug, from a journalistic perspective, explores how leaks are used to test narratives and steer public perception. 

Also in this episode, David wonders if written reports are becoming relics in a world obsessed with video and visual storytelling.  

And we ask: Can AI help restore strategic thinking in PR? And should public relations finally be regulated like other professions?  

Watch/Listen For

1:45 How will AI reshape PR, tactically or strategically?
5:36 Should PR be regulated like law or finance?
9:28 Are media leaks ethical, or just PR strategy?
14:33 Can visual storytelling replace traditional comms?
22:04 Are algorithms killing media access for everyone?

The Week Unspun is a weekly livestream every Friday at 10am ET/3pm BT. Check it out on our YouTube Channel or via this LinkedIn channel

Folgate Advisors

Curzon Public Relations Website

Stories and Strategies Website

Request a transcript of this livestream

Chapters

• 1:45 How will AI reshape PR, tactically or strategically?
• 5:35 Should PR be regulated like law or finance?
• 9:28 Are media leaks ethical, or just PR strategy?
• 14:33 Can visual storytelling replace traditional comms?
• 22:04 Are algorithms killing media access for everyone?

Transcript

Doug Downs (00:00):
Hey, it's Doug. Thanks for checking out this episode of The Week UnSpun as recorded live on Friday, November 28th, 2025, and live meant Farzana joined us still riding in her Uber on her way to her home studio.

Farzana Baduel (00:19):
Hello. Hello, hello and welcome to The Week UnSpun. It feels so good to be back. And I am Farzana. I am in London in the back of an Uber because I have just come from a Christmas team lunch.

Doug Downs (00:36):
I'm Doug Downs in Western Canada, but not in an Uber.

David Gallagher (00:39):
And I'm David Gallagher, also in London. I was wondering where you were Farzana.

Doug Downs (00:43):
Driving back from Prague. Did you Uber from Prague just to get home?

Farzana Baduel (00:48):
Oh gosh, I wish. So we have got a jam-packed session with you for you guys today. Now please, for those who are tuning in from LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, feel free to comment. We will be scanning the comments and sharing them as we chat. We are going to be talking about leaks. We're going to start off with my trip to Prague. I was invited to speak at Forum Media, which is this incredible conference for PR people and media people. It's been running for 25 years in the Czech Republic. And what really struck me was the importance that the country places in communications because we had the president of the Czech Republic turn up and not only did he speak, but he talked about the importance of media literacy and the importance of the work that we do as PR people, as media people, as marketing people in upholding democracy and the benefit it has to society.

(01:45):
So that was wonderful. We had incredible speakers that came from all over the world, and I gave a talk, interestingly enough, on looking at the impact of AI on the PR industry. But instead of the doom and gloom that everyone has, I took people back a little bit to the beginning of Edward Bernays, often people say is our godfather of modern-day PR. And Edward Bernays, he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he basically was the one who started practicing public relations back in the day in the form that we see it. And he saw PR as a very different discipline to what it has been in the last few decades. He very much saw it as a strategic management discipline, bringing in a confluence of experts from research and from psychologists and so forth. Of course, he was a nephew of Sigmund Freud. But the whole incredible talk was really about actually how AI isn't going to reduce us even further into just tactical, but actually elevate us into strategy because it will do all of the grind aspects of PR that will unleash our ability to focus on research and planning and strategy and measurement and evaluation. And that's what I wanted to ask you guys about. Do you think AI is going to be something that's going to bring us back to the original golden era of PR?

David Gallagher (03:13):
I don't know if I agree with you that Bernays was the golden era of PR, but maybe that's a conversation for a different...

Doug Downs (03:19):
Basil Clarke, maybe Basil Clarke would be in there as well.

David Gallagher (03:22):
Yeah, I think there were some founding fathers, more fathers than mothers unfortunately. But I guess what really struck me, and I will come back to your AI question, but you'd also commented that you thought PR should be a management discipline. And I'm going to ask Doug what you think about that. I think that it should be, and it could be, I'm not sure that it's there yet. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it's not there yet, at least in most settings, most corporate settings. But Doug, what do you think?

Doug Downs (03:51):
No, I completely agree. And with our podcast Stories and Strategies, we have multiple audiences. But when you create your personas, one of the personas that we've created is executives who hire and fire comms people because they need to live and breathe this stuff. And as we move forward in this AI world, one aspect of AI is there's going to be a ton of content out there and the battle is going to be for trust. And I know we sort of hear that as a buzz phrase, but trust is built over a repetitive time period, being consistent and showing your values. And that's leadership. Public relations done properly, not doctoring things. Public relations is built on foundations like trust. Absolutely. Executives need to live and breathe that.

David Gallagher (04:44):
Yeah, I know when I've sat around board tables and seen how they operate, even with some big companies, the PR person, the comms person usually does not have the same...

(04:56):
Doesn't have the same sort of gravity assigned to them as the Chief Legal Counsel or the CFO. And I don't know if that's a reflection of the person or the way PR is perceived or just the bigger backdrop. If you're the CFO, you have some accounting principles you have to respect. You have some fiduciary responsibilities you need to meet. If you are the Chief Legal Counsel, you have to give advice on what's legal. And we don't really have those sort of mandated regulatory requirements in PR. And I think in some ways that keeps us relegated to a slightly lower level of influence in corporate strategy and corporate...

Doug Downs (05:36):
And that brings in the discussion of regulation and certification for our craft. But Farzana, you and I have talked about, I know you're more regulation than I am for public relations because it infringes on, to me, it goes to that free speech argument that we could have forever and a day. But Farzana, over to you.

David Gallagher (05:55):
And you made it back to your desk.

Doug Downs (05:56):
Yeah, it's awesome.

Farzana Baduel (05:59):
I've made it back. I dunno. I just think that we live in a very different world. We live in a world where we have polarization, we have misinformation, we have disinformation. And the argument for regulation for our industry is, I think, a much more compelling argument than it was before. Because back in, I dunno, 16 years ago when I started, it was very much we didn't have much power per se. We were just pitching to gatekeepers. But now we are the gatekeepers. We don't need to go via journalists to put information into the public domain. We put it directly. And with that comes enormous power and responsibility. And I also think there are bad actors out there and we have seen societies have these fault lines that are created by division. We've seen some PR firms at the heart of it, which I won't name any names. But I do think that actually regulation is something that should at least be discussed. And we should acknowledge that we aren't living in the society and information system that we were 16, 20 years ago. We are living in a different world where everyone produces information and disinformation and misinformation has got very clear consequences.

David Gallagher (07:20):
Yeah. Well, I've kind of erred on the side of thinking maybe regulation would help, not just elevate the role of PR. I dunno if that really needs to happen for society, but I think it would give us a more meaningful set of contributions to business. I didn't mean to dodge the question about what AI would do, and it always seems to sneak into our conversations. I really think that the impact of AI on life is going to be much bigger than what it does to PR. And in some ways I feel like we're almost kind of naive to think, oh, is it going to change the way press releases are produced? Yeah. But it's going to do a lot more than that. And if you think back to other times that the architecture of communication has changed or evolved, really all of life has changed and evolved around that. If you think about the printing press and what that ushered in, you think about broadcast media, what that ushered in. I think we're in that kind of transformation and it's bigger than just moving PR a little bit forward or backward. It's going to be more fundamental than that.

Doug Downs (08:24):
I had a client yesterday say he's letting go of middle management all over the place because it takes him less time to instruct the AI and get something produced than to explain it to them and have them do it the way he wants it.

David Gallagher (08:39):
Right.

Doug Downs (08:39):
That's scary.

David Gallagher (08:41):
We debated whether we would introduce this. It's been in the headlines a lot, this question of whether we're on the edge of an AI bubble or not. There was a lot of chatter in a lot of business press in the last couple of weeks. It seems to have walked back a little bit since then. I think OpenAI had better results than people were necessarily anticipating. So maybe we're not plunging into another dot com type of bubble, but I don't know that we're out of danger yet there. In any case, this technology, in my opinion, will continue to advance, move forward and have real changes in the way we think, communicate and operate. I wanted to talk a little bit about leaks. I just felt like everywhere I looked last week and the week before, the headlines were driven by somebody leaking something to somebody else about something important.

(09:28):
And in fact, go back a week and a half ago, I think just before we went on the air last week, Axios produced a 28-point peace plan. Some are saying it was actually produced in Russia. It's definitely Russia-friendly. That's a whole other conversation. But that kicked off a whole flurry of negotiations, people flying back and forth across oceans, trying to decide was this an American plan, was it a Russian plan? A few days later, Axios reported, sorry, Bloomberg produced a transcript of a conversation between the key Russian negotiator and the key American negotiator basically coaching the Russian on how to deal with Trump and to move that negotiation forward. But it was a leaked transcript. Any number of parties could have probably had access to it. Apparently some of these conversations were on unencrypted media. And then just here in the UK where we are Farzana, the Chancellor’s budget was apparently accidentally leaked just 45 minutes before she was presenting it to a packed House.

(10:34):
I think there are still some questions about where that came from. So rather than trying to dissect each of those leaks, which we probably won't ever know all the real information about, I'm just wondering what you think about leaks in general. It seems like we're talking about it a lot. Somebody made some decisions to produce these things. I was curious from your point of view, as I consider you sort of the good fairy of PR ethics, do you see leaks as an ethical form of tactical activity? And Doug, your view as a journalist, how do you look at leaks? And I'll share maybe a couple perspectives from my point of view, but what do you think?

Farzana Baduel (11:15):
I think leaks are really interesting because I think leaks actually open the curtain to issues in culture, a lack of alignment. And so if you have leaks, it often shows that the person that is leaking doesn't feel safe enough to bring up their issues to management or to leadership. It also shows that there is a lack of alignment in the culture. So I think when you do see these leaks, I mean there are all sorts of legislative aspects and a legal lens on leaks as well because you have various different legislation in different countries that protect, for instance, whistleblowers. And so when is it a leak and when is it sort of whistleblowing? So I think that's another sort of dimension to add. But I think when I look at an organization leaking, I sort of think to myself, people are leaking because they do not believe in the leadership and the management and the decisions that they're making. And it makes me think how are they running that organization? And it makes me think about the internal communications and their employee engagement aspect as well, that they haven't given a forum for people to voice their concerns and their issues. And leaks are sometimes a last resort.

David Gallagher (12:28):
Yeah. Doug, what do you think?

Doug Downs (12:32):
So you asked me as a journalist. We always sort of saw them as strategic, that there was a purpose typically behind the leak. And as Farzana is saying, maybe it's a lack of trust on the inside, but political parties and organizations leak information all the time. It's a really old strategy. Sometimes they do it, often they do it to get ahead of the narrative, to try to dictate the narrative. And then when the rest of the piece comes out, the budget or whatever it is, it's compared against the original leak of information, which is how they want to control it. It could be to test public reaction, to soften bad news. It could be to force opponents into a particular corner. Apple was famous for leaks as a brand. It would do so to try to hype up anticipation or manage expectations for something new. So ethically, I would look at the leak, what's the motivation? Is it truthful, is it accurate or is it deceptive? What's the impact? Is it causing harm or is it providing benefit? And then the context, is it whistleblowing or political warfare?

David Gallagher (13:39):
Yeah. And the examples I gave are kind of possibly state actors involved, and that's probably at a different level than most of us have ever operated on. But it did make me think about, in my own career, whether I have leaked information. I went back and looked. The PRSA in the U.S., the CIPR, both frown on leaks or at least mishandling confidential information. So I don't know if they use the word leak specifically in the code, but there's definitely sort of a frown on that. But I was thinking about two different examples. I teach a journalism course to some graduates in Rome and I take them through a couple of case studies. And one of them I would call kind of a strategic leak. And they actually, as journalists, didn't see it as a problem or a leak. But the short version of the story is that I was working with a small organization taking on a bigger coalition of larger organizations, so kind of a David and Goliath story.

(14:33):
And they'd issued an analysis about why their point of view on a particular policy was better than the bigger players in the industry. Not really very newsworthy by itself. I sent it to the New York Times, the AP, I think the Washington Post at the time. And then I sent it to the people at the bigger organizations and I said, as a courtesy, I'm letting you know we sent this to these news outlets. If you want to respond, I just want to give you a heads up. It got a lot of coverage because they did respond, because they did go to CNN, they did go to the Post, saying you can't run this without our point of view. And the strategy behind that is that this report never would've seen the light of day without these bigger players calling in to say that they wanted to have a point of view.

(15:15):
I dunno if that qualifies as a leak or not, but the journalism students didn't think it was. The other story, more tactical, literally we produced, there was a press conference with some study results that were going to be very newsworthy and it was a positive for my client, a positive study, but there were some nuances to it that could get lost in a press conference. You never know who's going to ask what. And it could have been a good story overshadowed by some of the nuances, or it could have just been a good story. So I literally handed the story to CNN moments before the press conference so that they would run a good story on it. They didn't have much time. They were in broadcast, they weren't in print. That was much more of a classic leak. And there the journalism students had a problem with it. They thought that I didn't give the other journalists a fair shake. Maybe the story had been distorted. It almost definitely was as a result of that. And they saw that as possibly a thumbs down.

Doug Downs (16:14):
Anyway, that's the other aspect. If the leak is to media that you know is going to favor you, and let's face it, that exists a lot. You're right. And that's where other media will come at you with teeth showing because they smell a rat.

David Gallagher (16:29):
Yeah, yeah. Well, I just find these stories really interesting. We always look for what's going on in the world, but also how does it reflect what's happening in some sort of PR decision-making space? And I think about this all the time. We can't always compare ourselves to the CIA or to the Russian government in terms of what sort of tactics they might use. But I think we do occasionally get presented with our own decisions. I'm going to move us to something you and I exchanged quite a bit about this week, Doug. And it was this essay written by Derek Thompson on Substack, and I highly recommend him to follow. But it was called "Television Is Everything" or "Everything Is Becoming Television." And his hypothesis, his premise, was that every medium, every media content is beginning to move and look a lot more like TV.

(17:25):
And he didn't mean like broadcast TV. He was saying more like the episodic flow of visual imagery. And he had some examples. I think he looked at Facebook saying that they weren't really a social media company, they were more of a video company. He had an example that I think was interesting to you about YouTube becoming number one for podcasts. Yeah, number one for podcasts, but with a video background. So I want to give you a chance to respond to that, but just my take is that, yeah, I think that things are looking a lot more like television. I was thinking I've met two different corporate narrative advisors, consultants, and both of them frame their whole package for companies on how to make the corporate story sound more TV... to move episodically, to create heroes...

Doug Downs (18:15):
And...

David Gallagher (18:16):
Counter heroes and real drama to that.

Doug Downs (18:18):
Yeah, for me, I mean that all sounds like story and video just happens to be the way we're moving it along. In the metaverse, video might yield to something else, but video will probably never go away. So Derek's with The Atlantic. He's a heck of a writer. I love the piece. I do want to clarify that one point. He says at one point in the article that YouTube is now number one by a mile. It's not even close as the most popular platform for podcasts. Not quite. There are recent studies that show YouTube is the most popular discovery channel for podcasts. Absolutely. But people are finding podcasts and then listening on Spotify in most of the world and Apple here in North America. So we're not linear beasts that way. And most consumption time for podcasts is audio on Apple or Spotify. Or even really interesting: Gen Z is listening to podcasts on YouTube and not even watching the video. And honestly, The Week UnSpun is our effort to push back and spark those longer conversations, but using video to make room for deeper thinking. Because if everything is turning into television, we might as well use the screen to pull people back into the room.

David Gallagher (19:36):
But I think about this also from a corporate communications perspective. I think a lot of us still think in terms of a written document as being the basis for forming our thoughts, for organizing bigger theses around them, and communicating. If you think about how we were all trained, we were all trained to write essays or, I trained as a journalist, I learned how to write in inverted pyramid form. But it was still all textual based. And I think there is a richness to writing and reading that organizes your thoughts differently. I don't know that visual video is better, but it is different. And I can already see my own thought processes moving towards a visual way of thinking and organizing my thoughts. And I just wonder if corporate communications is moving at pace with that. Are reports enough? Are text-based documents the way to really engage and communicate? So...

Farzana Baduel (20:32):
I wanted to bring in this comment from Dr. Mike Short: "Does everyone have bread on the table, local versus national versus international?" And I think it's relevant to what we've been discussing because if you think about it now, this increasing TV-style format of communications is becoming the norm. But why? And I would argue it's because of ka-ching. Back in the day, the only people who could afford TV-style formats were these very, very well-funded media outlets. But now look at us. We have the ability to communicate the way we can on UnSpun using the software that we do. It's become much more accessible. The barriers to entry in terms of cost and technical expertise have dramatically lowered. And so TV was always an effective medium. The only barriers were cost and technical expertise. And now with the softwares that are very user-friendly, the costs have plummeted. It's become a lot more accessible. I think there is a greater accessibility for mediums such as television-style formats and indeed just wider communications. I think that it has become more inclusive by its nature. But of course, now you've got the rise of the strategic algorithms that I think all of a sudden is changing the game and it's not this utopian landscape that we originally thought it would be.

David Gallagher (22:04):
Yeah, so you see this more as opportunity than threat. Is that fair?

Farzana Baduel (22:10):
Well, I think we had a little bit of opportunity, but I think the gates are closing on opportunity because now you're getting, I think, the owners of various different platforms beginning to understand the power that they have with their algorithms. That they can not just use it in terms of increasing eyeballs, but there's political pressure on the owners of a lot of the social media platforms. And so I think you are beginning to see the door closing in terms of that initial opportunity that was meant to be for all. I think it still is to a certain extent. Everyone still with a smartphone has the ability to publish, but whether the algorithms will give you the same level playing field as a more favored user politically or geographically, obviously is up to the new kings and queens of those who own the algorithm.

Doug Downs (23:03):
Awesome. Another good show. I love the live feel of this, driving all the way back from Prague, joining us in the Uber on the way here. Just bravo for that. And I don't know how Curzon pays for that. As always, thanks to superstar producers Emily Page and David Olajide. The Week UnSpun is a co-production of Curzon Public Relations, Stories and Strategies, and Folgate Advisors. Shows go fast. We've got the recordings on Apple, Spotify, the video obviously on YouTube. And just one final thought: in everything you do, with each action you take, you're casting a ballot for whom you will become and how people will see you. Have a great weekend.

Farzana Baduel (23:44):
Bye.