How PR's organisational gaslighting problem guts credibility

We’ve all been there. In fact, we can see it happen every day:

• A CEO claims corporate innocence to the media with a “Safety is our highest priority!” message while in the throes of a crisis involving human injury or even death, obviously due to a previously well-documented series of escalating product malfunctions.
   
• A political spokesperson holds a press conference and proceeds to attack reporters who ask valid questions about clear policy failures that also incur violations of law during an elected leader’s administration.
   
• A marketing director fires her PR firm as “incompetent” when PR counsel gives the marketing director truthful data about why her brand’s latest ad campaign – crafted by a separate ad agency – is spurring backlash among key stakeholders. 

Welcome to the world of organisational gaslighting

While ‘gaslighting’ is a term best known in the context of emotionally and psychologically abusive intimate relationships in domestic settings, the concept is becoming more and more visible in the PR management and brand-spokesmanship sphere.

That’s not good news. 

The term ‘gaslighting’ originated with the 1944 film noir, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman, in which a Victorian-era husband tries to hide his nefarious intentions by making his new heiress wife think she’s going insane, by playing a range of cruel tricks on her. Among his sleights of hand: making the gaslights in the couple’s home dim seemingly by themselves, then telling his disillusioned wife that she imagined it. 

In modern parlance, the word ‘gaslight’ has evolved as a verb. 

Merriam-Webster announced ‘gaslighting’ as its 2022 Word of the Year after online lookups for the term increased 1,740 per cent in 2022 over the prior year – in the wake of the pandemic’s aftermath. 

In the organisational, business, and government contexts, gaslighting takes on a systemic and industrial scale, when unethical tactics closely associated with interpersonal gaslighting are used by entire management teams to obfuscate reality and manipulate mass audiences.

Organisational gaslighting may be one of the most destructive trustbusters in the modern era, due to these factors:

• Knowingly misleading people and even boldly lying to them compose the (dark) heart of this practice.
   
• Casting undeserved blame, doubt, and false aspersions on innocent parties – as if they’re the culprits of wrongdoing and misconduct – is a common deflection/distraction tactic.
   
• Inflicting intentional, weaponised psychological harm on others without regard to mental health consequences adds an extra layer of ‘evil’ to it.
   
• Internal and external stakeholders alike can be victims of gaslighting, although the manifestations of abuse can vary.
   
• It’s often quite obvious to reasonable people when an organisation is gaslighting via its PR apparatus – making it immediately less trustworthy.  

While organisational gaslighting as a concept has not been codified and studied widely as a specific driver of workplace mental wellness decline, consider the abusive workplace behaviours often associated with organisational gaslighting techniques (although each of these behaviours may also exist as mutually exclusive from a systemic gaslighting culture):

• Accusing
• Blackmailing
• Brainwashing
• Bullying
• Coercing
• Defaming
• Ganging-up
• Ghosting
• Guilt-tripping
• Humiliating
• Intimidating
• Isolating
• Name-calling
• Scapegoating
• Stonewalling
• Trivialising

The Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI) reported in its 2023 State of Ethics & Compliance in the Workplace update that “An alarming 87% of employees indicated that their workplace does not have a strong ethical culture.” 

As such, is it any wonder that workplace mental health statistics have tanked in recent years, as management teams all too often seek to gaslight their way to internal and public acceptance, amid serious, unaddressed problems at hand?

The sad reality of organisational gaslighting is that ill-motivated culprits of this behaviour will typically view PR as the critical bow and quiver to deliver desired gaslighting outcomes:

• Overwhelming people with complex counterarguments or even baseless counteraccusations, to distract and change the subject;
   
• Wearing out and exhausting “complainers,” whistleblowers and anyone else who dares question obvious problems or misconduct that’s verifiably occurring;
   
• Intimidating and warning would-be complainers that if they report problems themselves, then they will be targeted, too – thereby silencing them.

PR tactics may include traditional methods of media relations, digital communication, and employee / internal ‘relations’ that work in concert to purvey a gaslighting message or finger-pointing strategy as part of a “persuasion” campaign. 

So, how much is organisational gaslighting occurring or observed among PR leaders themselves? 

A recent industry listening exercise captured interesting insights, which will ramp up later this year to a full-scale academic study, now in conceptual process by the University of South Carolina-based Global Strategic Communication Consortium (GSCC). 

The listening exercise, spearheaded from 29 May – 6 June 2025, by the Pulse Business in London, queried 865 PR and comms leaders predominantly based in the UK, with a response rate split by target audience: 30% in-house and 70% PR and comms agency CEOs. 

• 58% of this universe of respondents have noticed an increase in organisational gaslighting.
   
• 35% say they believe their team is regularly exposed to organisational gaslighting behaviour by clients, with only 24% saying they are exposed “to no extent at all.” 
   
• Diversion/deflection and ignoring/refusing to listen essentially appear to be the most prevalent gaslighting behaviours by clients in the PR industry sector surveyed. 
   
• A fear of reprisals and a lack of role models stops people from speaking up – otherwise characterised as engaging in self-censorship to avoid criticism.  

More data will be forthcoming from the GSCC. 

In the meantime, it may prove worthwhile to have an “anti-gaslight” awareness campaign within your PR team’s training schedule or even addressed in employee codes of conduct. 

At a minimum, holding a group discussion about this topic and re-committing to a culture of civility, truthfulness, and respect will go a long way to dim the switch on organisational gaslighting’s negative potential within your team and your company. 

A founder of the #PRethics Community on LinkedIn, Mary Beth West is a 30-year PR strategist based in the US, specialising in advancing an ethical PR industry that serves societal good.