Matt Yglesias co-founded Vox, left for Substack in 2020, and built Slow Boring into one of the largest individual-writer political subscription businesses in the United States.
Washington stopped reading press releases. The public affairs function — connecting companies with policymakers, regulators, and the political process — is operating in conditions that have shifted meaningfully since 2023. The bipartisan reset, the new playbook, and the firms adjusting.
Politics and public relations intersect at scale across campaign communications, government affairs, ballot initiative work, political consulting, crisis response, and the broader public affairs category. The major firms operating at the intersection (BCW, FleishmanHillard, Edelman public affairs practice, SKDK, Mercury Public Affairs, Bully Pulpit Interactive, GMMB, Precision Strategies). The five disciplines that compound across both political and corporate communications work in 2026.
When Trump attacks a Morning Joe co-host, the show's ratings nearly double — 1.66 million viewers against a 896,000 baseline, beating Fox & Friends. The cross-audience tune-in mechanic, why it happens, whether the spike is sustainable, and what it teaches program development teams currently building strategy for the fall.
Al Jazeera is under siege at home. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt have imposed a blockade on Qatar and demanded the network's closure. Qatar refused. The demand list, the alliances, and the counter-pressure track running against the platforms.
A CNN headline this week: "Donald Trump is Fox News' Top PR guy." Four months in, the defining feature of the Trump White House press operation is a media-relations strategy that runs almost entirely against the traditional press corps and almost entirely in favor of a single friendly cable network. The Muir interview, the amplification loop, and what it means for the network press.
Ten years on, the trade press retrospective on Trump's 2016 media operation reads differently. Four operating principles, two case studies (the veterans-charity fundraiser, the Megyn Kelly cycle), and the honest verdict on what actually transferred into two presidencies.
Their papers should have been filed (one in 2014 and one in 2015), but they just amended the filing status during November 2016.
Glenn Beck has reinvented himself three full times in eight years. Most media operators can't do it once. What Beck's reinvention discipline teaches every brand operator now facing the same platform shift.
The Pentagon's public affairs budget runs $600M to $1.4B annually. The A-tier contractors (DDB, VMLY&R, Wunderman Thompson), B-tier specialist communications firms (Edelman, Burson, Weber Shandwick, Brunswick, Teneo federal practices), and C-tier defense-specialist boutiques (Sayres, McBee, Cassidy, S-3 Group, Vogel Group).
