Reputation Radar

PR, corporate and crisis communications, sourced weekly.

The CFDA’s CEO Apologized in Minutes. The Silence After Lasted Longer.

CNN · Sept. 14, 2026

Steven Kolb, CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, was filmed physically restraining two animal rights protesters who interrupted a runway show at New York Fashion Week, grabbing their signs and covering their mouths as models kept walking. Kolb posted an apology on Instagram within the hour, writing that he’d “reacted inappropriately” and should have let security handle it. But neither he nor the CFDA responded to any follow-up questions from reporters afterward, leaving the apology as the only official word on an incident caught on video from multiple angles. A fast apology buys a company the first news cycle, but going quiet right after tends to leave the video, not the statement, as the thing people remember.

Google Says It Supports AI Safety Laws. Its Lobbyists Are Writing the Loopholes.

NPR · Sept. 18, 2026

NPR found that Google lobbyists have been shopping nearly identical draft language to lawmakers in at least ten states for chatbot safety bills, each version containing exemptions that could exclude Google’s own Gemini and other major chatbots from the rules the bills claim to establish. The investigation traced the pattern through lobbying records, interviews with state lawmakers in both parties, and testimony from families who’d lost children after harmful chatbot interactions and later found their own input sidelined as the bills moved through statehouses. Asked about the pattern, Google told NPR only that it’s “committed to supporting thoughtful, effective AI legislation,” a line that doesn’t address the specific loopholes reporters had already documented in language traced back to the company. When a company’s public statement and its lobbyists’ actual asks contradict each other on the record, the statement stops functioning as reassurance and starts functioning as evidence against the company making it.

Anthropic’s CEO Called for an AI Slowdown. The Obvious Question Followed Fast.

CNBC · Sept. 13-15, 2026

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay proposing that AI labs agree to pace their development, warning that safety work isn’t keeping up with how fast the technology is advancing. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk publicly backed the idea within hours. But the pushback landed just as fast: a prominent White House AI advisor publicly asked why, if Amodei genuinely believes the worst outcomes are likely, he’s still running a frontier AI lab instead of stepping aside. It’s a version of a challenge that follows any public position: the moment you say something should slow down or stop, people start checking whether your own actions match the words.

A Sports Betting Ad Meant to Sell “Just Sports.” Female Athletes Heard Something Else.

NBC News / The Athletic · Sept. 15-18, 2026

Sports prediction platform Novig cast Sydney Sweeney in a campaign built around a simple pitch, betting on sports and nothing else, with Sweeney posing in minimal clothing alongside sports equipment. Professional female athletes, including Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus and gymnast Gracie Kramer, said the ad did the opposite of its stated intent, using a woman’s body to sell sports at the exact moment they’ve spent their careers fighting to be seen for their performance instead of their appearance. Several responded publicly with their own training footage, captioned to contrast what they called real women in sports against the campaign’s version. A company can genuinely believe a campaign is about one thing and still have it land, with total clarity, as being about something else entirely to the audience closest to the subject.

Buckingham Palace Broke Its Own Rule to Fight Back. The Strategy It Chose Was Unusual.

NBC News · Sept. 17, 2026

Buckingham Palace has a stated policy of not commenting on books, but this week it broke that rule to respond to Earl Charles Spencer’s upcoming memoir, which recounts a disputed exchange with King Charles in the days after Princess Diana’s 1997 death. Rather than directly denying the specific claim, the Palace’s statement suggested that grief “can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize,” raising a question about Spencer’s own reliability rather than contesting the facts point by point. It’s a notably different approach than a flat denial, and a real departure from the institution’s own long-standing practice of staying silent on exactly this kind of story. Choosing to respond at all is itself a signal, and choosing to respond by questioning the source’s memory rather than the substance is a strategy that only works if it doesn’t end up reading as attacking someone’s grief instead of answering the claim.