The Loudest Voice in the Room is Losing the Argument

Evan Nierman

In over two decades of working in high-stakes PR and crisis management, I’ve heard one request from clients more than any other: “get me into The New York Times.” In fact, I’m willing to bet most of the people in this profession have heard some variation of those words, perhaps with another major outlet inserted in place of the Gray Lady, who hasn’t been gray in quite some time.

That instinct made sense in the past, because it was based on the simple assumption that if you appeared in a top-tier outlet with huge readership then some of that credibility would be imputed to you, too. But somewhere along the way that calculation collapsed. The biggest megaphones in America no longer guarantee you will be heard, much less believed. Messages designed to cut through the noise and land with impact in 2026 need a much smarter approach.

For generations, The Times served as the closest thing American life offered to a public verdict. Then, President Trump spent years branding it as “failing” and “fake news”, and for a large segment of the country, those labels and the desired stigma stuck. Trump’s $15 billion defamation suit against the paper is unfolding in federal court right now, and the case was kept alive by a federal judge who ordered another round of amendments.

Set aside, if you can, the merits of the lawsuit, your own politics, and whether you see Trump’s label for the paper as far or off-base, because the professional reality is what I am trying to focus on here. A masthead that once settled arguments and was seen as the holy grail of journalistic integrity now serves, for half of Americans, as a reason to dismiss by default whatever news appears beneath it. Like many mainstream outlets, millions of people have simply stopped trusting the source.

Regardless of industry, the success of almost every institution, public figure, or company largely hinges on public trust. People don’t eat food whose quality they question, won’t vote for politicians they think are misleading them, and don’t use products or services from brands they don’t trust.

But biased news coverage, fallout from cancel culture, and AI-generated content saturation have fundamentally changed the way that trust is established, making it much, much harder to earn.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 70% of people are now hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who holds different values or relies upon different sources of information from the ones they typically access. The same report noted that over the past five years, 40% of respondents reported they had lost trust in national government leaders, while 35% reported losing trust in major news organizations.

Conversely, the same group of respondents reported a huge increase in trust placed in neighbors, family, friends and coworkers. That gives communicators an important takeaway: trust itself remains abundant, but it lives closer to home than ever.

If communicators choose to route their most important messages through institutions that a meaningful share of their audience has already chosen to distrust and discount, then they will wave them away on sight. Deliver the same messages through an avenue they believe, and it will arrive with full force.

You simply cannot pitch your way into an inner circle. Someone already on the inside of that closed loop must find you credible and interesting enough to share your message. But people only pass along content that actually moves them, which is why the hour-long podcast or the unscripted social media video can do their work much more effectively than any press release could ever hope to accomplish.

Spend an hour listening to an executive get challenged and answer tough questions well, and you will feel like you know them. At Red Banyan we refer to this as Authentic Interaction, the other AI. In a market where artificial intelligence is flattening every brand’s written and social media content into the same voice, it will increasingly be the main kind of message that still travels organically.

To be clear, major national outlets still matter. They command enormous audiences and certainly belong in any serious national media strategy. But the mistake lies in treating them as the entire strategy, because putting your client in front of tens of millions of people accomplishes very little if half of them tune the outlet out completely.

Many times, the smarter and more strategic PR play involves going niche. For many clients, the trade publication their industry members actually read, the regional newspaper in their own backyard or the newsletters or sites where their investors or customers congregate actually deliver more bang for the buck, and carry persuasive weight with the exact people they need to reach.

Those kinds of placements now also speak to machines as well as people. Muck Rack's review of more than one million links cited by AI models found that 84% trace back to earned media. Moreover, many of these systems reach for niche outlets whenever the user query turns industry-specific. Smaller, but more appropriate outlets can both persuade stakeholders what to think about you today, while also teaching AI what to say about you tomorrow.

One outstanding story appearing in an outlet trusted by key audiences will be of much more value than trophy placements, especially in outlets that large swaths of the public are predisposed to ignore.

This is precisely where seasoned PR professionals earn their keep. Knowing which outlets matter to which audiences, and having the ability to build and maintain genuine relationships with the reporters behind them, is invaluable. This is increasingly the case given that earned media is relied upon by AI models when they provide answers to the questions posed by users. In an age of hyper-partisanship, breakneck news cycles, and 24/7 Internet connectivity, there has never been a more challenging yet important time for organizations and individuals to bolster and protect their single most valuable asset: their reputation.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin’.” When it comes to the field of public relations, that is certainly the case. But opportunities abound for those professional communicators willing to build trust and their clients’ reputations. The key to success will increasingly be forgoing past practices in favor of new approaches focused on niche wins and feeding AI models.

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Evan Nierman is the Founder and CEO of award-winning crisis PR firm Red Banyan, and author of Amazon bestsellers “Crisis Averted” and “The Cancel Culture Curse.”