“Childishly written!”
“A disgrace”
These are the words most junior PR account executives fear hearing from clients about 
press releases submitted for review. But it was Donald Trump that just said them, in tweets and interviews, about a statement that Fox News issued yesterday.
Fox tried to use humor and taunts in a last ditch attempt to goad Donald into joining tonight’s presidential debate. Apparently, an article would not be journalistic – so they chose that good old staple of ginned up news, the press release, to send the message.
(I guess humor is subjective. What do you think, was it funny or not? Here’s an excerpt, as cited here: “We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”)
Well, It is now the eleventh hour, and it seems that the Fox News mock statement backfired. Trump really is taking his ball and going home. To the network’s credit, they did not yield to his demands that they remove Megyn Kelly as a moderator.
So who won? I guess that remains to be seen. But it is pretty clear that the press release idea helped seal the deal against his participation – likely not Fox’s intended result.
Meanwhile, the episode made me curious about other fake news releases and their consequences.
I asked our team for examples, and they sent these:
