This time five years ago - February 2020 - I found myself in conversation after conversation, trying to help people and their organisations understand what was coming and what they needed to do to prepare. Nobody believed their existing ‘ordinary' would ever be anything other than their known day-to-day experience. But the COVID bug was biting. Borders began to close. People began to get very sick. But the reality of a global pandemic seemed beyond the collective imagination. Even as signs pointed to impending disruption, the idea that everything — work, movement, relationships, daily life itself — would change overnight remained unthinkable.
Fast forward to today - February 2025. We are midway through the decade, at a point in pandemic cycles where, historically, things go a little wild. But this time, it’s not just a virus raising the global temperature. It’s war. It’s power plays. It’s autocrats and technocrats. It’s a reckoning of truths and falsehoods so entangled that our collective reality finds itself in need of intensive care.
The next week may see the unravelling of pan-European peace, as Russia and America position themselves to ‘settle’ Ukraine — a country illegally invaded and its sovereignty repeatedly violated by Russia. That alone should have us clutching our hearts but as economic bullying and digital coups dominate the actions of Trump and his enablers, it seems they are poised to reshape global stability with nothing but self-interest and profit in mind.
We are once again at a moment in time where things will not — and cannot — be the same again. However it unfolds, the only certainty is chaos will follow.
During the first phase of the COVID crisis, communication — whether we agreed with it or not — had structure. There were podiums. There were daily briefings. Scientists were present. Public officials, for the most part, attempted to offer coherence in the chaos. And though many of those attempts failed, at least the frameworks existed.
This time, as we move closer to conflict, truth itself will be governed by chaos. The forces shaping that chaos are not just algorithms, not just faceless, nameless systems amplifying distortions. The guiding hand shaping alternative realities, smart technology and ’new truth’ is unquestionably human.
For the past five years, we’ve been working through permacrisis, where one upheaval seamlessly bleeds into another. We never really exited crisis communication mode — COVID was merely the start of a cascading series of disruptions. Economic shocks, extreme weather events, geopolitical instability and disinformation wars have left no room to catch our breath. While the pandemic at least offered a momentary illusion of collective action, we now stand at a point where division is actively cultivated. Truth is disputed and it’s weaponised.
Public relations and communication professionals — historically mediators, bridge-builders and sense makers — are caught in the thick of this conflict. And here is the tragedy - we are not just up against the hollow leaders and technocrats. We are up against each other.
For every communicator striving for ethical practice, working to convey the truth, the facts, the increasingly grim realities, there may be another choosing to fuel disinformation. There are entire networks — organisations, political operatives, influencers — who have abandoned fact in favour of personal gain at any cost. And they are skilled, dedicated operators who are steadfast in their belief that autocracy is cool and those they consider lesser humans are not.
If we are to retain any credibility, if we are to continue claiming that our work builds relationships based on trust, we need to confront this reality head-on. When does opinion become the reality? When does perspective outweigh the truth?
Truth Suffocated by Power
It’s not just the global stage. The reshaping of reality is happening daily in most nations around the world.
For example, today in New Zealand, our Deputy Prime Minister declared water fluoridation in one of our cities as a "despotic Soviet-era disgrace”. Never mind that the science is sound. Never mind that regular and affordable dental care is far beyond the reach of the majority of people in this country. His intervention isn’t about health. It’s about securing his own political position — stoking division in a community that is already agitated.
And so we find ourselves in a situation where people no longer know who to believe. The science is clear but the communication has been so muddied that certainty is impossible, doubt is sown and hope trickles away. The truth is there but it has been buried beneath political manoeuvring, hollow rhetoric and performative outrage. This is a minister who regularly berates, bullies and belittles our much-diminished mainstream media and who wields the sword of illusory truth to great effect - largely unchallenged.
Where do we stand in all of this?
Do we have the guts to call out the political distortion of facts? Do we have the support we need from our peers and associations to push back? Or do we simply step aside and make way for those who will nod along and say, “Yes, Minister,” regardless of the harm it causes?
Because make no mistake — this is not just about fluoride in the water or any other issue or cause. It is about control. It is about the normalisation of leadership that disregards evidence in favour of ideology. And it is an uncomfortable truth that unless we challenge, we are not only failing in our professional duty, we are complicit in the harm that follows.
Those of us in public relations and communication have some particular responsibilities. Our remit is simple but urgent:
- Help people understand what is happening.
- Help the truth to breathe and ease the stranglehold of manipulation.
- Push back against the warping, twisting and reshaping of reality by those who wield power unchecked.
We need to be absolutely adept at identifying misinformation, disinformation and malinformation, then calling it out. We must become forensic in our work, relentless in the pursuit of verifiable facts and prepared to stand firm in the face of distortion. This is hard to do - the truth gets very uncomfortable when it means you could lose your job, lose your house, lose your liberty - and in some places in the world, lose your life. But the consequences of not standing up, not standing firm, not being loud and clear will be far worse for our children and the generations to come.
This is the point where public relations and communication professionals must decide will we be guardians of truth or the mouthpiece of power?
In an ideal world, organisations and institutions would be preparing for what’s coming with fairness and balance at their core. But we are not in that world.
Instead, we are in a world where polarisation is not an accident — it is a strategy. We are in a world where the biggest voices are not always the most truthful, where bad actors have the loudest megaphones and where good actors find it hard to be heard.
Part of our work involves understanding who is shaping the messages and why. We have to accept that the battle over narratives is now a deeply political one and our sector is at the centre of it.
So we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions.
Are you clear on the forces at play? It’s no longer enough to ‘push out key messages’ and hope for the best. You need to know how your organisation’s communication sits within the wider information war.
Are you willing to take a stand? Neutrality is a luxury we can no longer afford. If your work is being used to distort reality or fuel harmful narratives, silence is complicity.
Are you prepared for truth to be messy? There won’t be a clear podium moment this time. The world will not pause for structured updates. You will need to navigate the uncertainty, the conflicting sources, the deliberate attempts to muddy the waters.
I take no comfort in saying this but things are about to get significantly worse. The structures that once provided at least some coherence — governments, media institutions, international alliances — are being deliberately undermined. And in their place, we are left with noise, division and manipulation.
If we, as public relations and communication professionals, are to be useful, we must redefine what it means to communicate in an era of conflict-driven chaos and determine our priorities.
We are one step beyond crisis communication, now stoically positioned in chaos communication.
We must continue to build strong relationships, defend reputations, manage risks and issues but we must simultaneously hold the line against distortion. Ensure that history will not be written entirely by those who profit from deception.
Five years ago, we saw what a global crisis could do to us. This time, the crisis will not come from nature but from people. And that makes the stakes even higher. In the coming months, we will see things change at a pace few are expecting. The structures that once gave us a sense of coherence are being deliberately dismantled. We will see economic shocks, supply chain disruptions, rising poverty and escalating division. And unless we are prepared to confront what is coming, we will sleepwalk into a reality we are completely unprepared for - just as we did in 2020.
Back then, we adapted because we had to. And we were able to do so because, despite the fear and uncertainty, there was still a sufficiency of shared values across the world. However imperfect, there remained a collective understanding that we needed to support one another, to find a way through together.
But this time, adaptation won’t be enough.
Because those shared values — the ones that made collective action possible — are being buried alongside the truth. Deliberately hidden out of sight. To manage what is heading towards us - at hurricane speeds - practitioners are going to have to move away from the roles they've become used to in the decades since World War II. We must learn how to help people find and liberate the truths held prisoner by those in power, entirely for their own ends.
In doing so, there’s a chance to restore hope and humanity because, despite the efforts to make it seem otherwise, the majority of the people on this earth are good, kind and decent - even when faced with the despots, their spectres of war and their torture of the truth.