Prognosticating what a New Year may hold for the PR and strategic communication sector always requires – at least for me – a look back, to integrate perspective on our current trajectory. For this analysis, I’m going to start way back.

In the semester before I graduated from university in 1994 with a degree in journalism / public relations, students were only just beginning to access something called “e-mail” through intra-university servers. I recall that my first e-mail address assigned to me by my university may have been about 60 characters long! 

It was sort of an age of technology innocence: Everything was so slow and clunky back then in my new-found online world. I well-remember conducting my first Boolean internet search from my college dorm room desktop computer, where my brand-new, very loud, squawky, painfully slow, telephone-line modem could miraculously connect to the server at my on-campus library, so that I no longer always physically had go to the library building for my coursework research. 

By my second year in the PR agency workforce (1994-95), this thing called “the Internet” and the “World Wide Web” was all the rage. It was “the next big thing” forecast to change society. It was the first time in my young professional life that I realized that the most powerful college minor that I likely should have pursued as an undergraduate student was not in business, but rather, in some combination of computer and information science. I still hold that opinion, to this day. 

Similar to the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as today’s “next big thing” – with some folks talking about it with an air of authority that vastly exceeded their ability to see beyond a certain time horizon – everyone in the mid-1990s was furiously trying to learn everything they could about “The Internet.” Meanwhile, no one really could conceive what it would mean for all of us. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. It’s interesting to me in retrospect how history repeats itself, in various ways.

As the Year 2000 dawned, media technologies and proliferations exploded, alongside the transformational event for us in the United States of September 11, 2001. During a very brief period of time, my generation – Gen X – shed all our innocence from our formative, pre-Internet years. Suddenly, the macro-reality of how nations, societies, cultures, and – perhaps most important – political, faith-based, and lifestyle ideologies interfaced, for better or for worse, was thrust in our faces. It was something we could touch, participate in, influence, and help shape – or not – in ways that previous generations of ordinary people never could have experienced or thought possible. The underbelly of this capacity to use media for our global connections and influence wasn’t always pretty. Societal fears, hatreds, and distrust also could be provoked, manipulated, stoked, and sustained through these same proliferating media. 

By the end of the early 2000s, as social media became ubiquitous, we all could see, perceive and experience the massive potential of PR and strategic communication as a force for great societal good… or, the opposite: as a force of depraved intent by bad actors, with such means-and-ends as abuses of power, tyranny, silencing of valid voices with less power, or even promoting physical violence and harm toward innocent people. 

With this backdrop for context as the new quarter-century takes hold in 2025, the challenges and opportunities that I see for us in public relations fall in two simple buckets. 

The “challenge” bucket for 2025 can be boiled down to two words: organizational gaslighting. I think this rising, unethical phenomenon poses one of the vastest threats to society today – and sadly, our industry in PR / strategic communication is at the centre of it. 

The term “gaslighting” became particularly prominent in recent years, dealing more so in interpersonal relationships. Gaslighting behaviour is, by my own loose definition, culprits’ unethical manipulation of another person or group(s) of people, by imposing upon them false reinventions of past events, insisting on verifiably false claims as fact, and attacking honest people who seek and value the truth by constantly stonewalling them and forcing them to re-verify reality. Gaslighting culprits of misconduct do these deeds by purposely invoking psychological pain, discord, suffering and harm, so they can gain power in relationships or over larger communities or societies, at others’ expense. In the realm of PR ethics, “gaslighting” is unethical misconduct, on acid.

Sadly, there is a fair share of folks in the world who operate by gaslighting people all the time – intimate partners most often, but also family members, colleagues / employees, and even entire groups of people. But even more alarming, gaslighting at an industrial scale has now taken hold in politics, government, corporate, and certainly news / editorial media. 

With great alarm, I’ve seen and witnessed far too many PR practitioners and comms executives embrace and normalize organizational gaslighting in their work product, despite the unethical bending of mass public opinion and behaviours, using techniques of deceit. The normalization of organizational gaslighting is now having massive impacts on societal mental health – and I can speak from years of personal experience, given my struggles to confront PR industry ethics misconduct, in the U.S. and elsewhere. 

Circling back to the decades-long historical context and ramp-up of how digital technology evolved to be the toolbox for PR / comms societal good or societal ill, the use of these tools in organizational gaslighting by people who hold PR and communication posts cannot be overlooked or dismissed. 

This fact leads me to our industry’s very simple, 2025 “opportunity” bucket: do something about it. In this regard, we do know what we do know. For example, we have a vast assortment of PR ethics codes to guide next steps and policymaking, to combat organizational gaslighting. We have many strong, visionary, and ethically minded industry leaders worldwide. We have industry forums and association bodies to serve as organizing forces.

We shall see how our industry rises to this occasion. If we don’t, we’ll bear the consequences ourselves. 

With a 30-year career in public relations, Mary Beth West, APR, FPRCA, is one of the most outspoken critics on PR industry ethics issues in the global industry. She is a founder of The #PRethics Community on LinkedIn.