On Michael Wolff

Truth Lies and Blame Games

London 18 November 2025

So. Hundreds of years ago, or in 2007,

Michael Wolff

kindly blurbed a collection of essays I edited for Atlantic Books about the relationship between PR and Journalism, a collection which included contributions from notables of then and now.

It had impact then and now. The tempest roaring around Michael over the cache of emails and a profile ofJeffrey Epstein in which various knives have sharpened makes me revisit the book as i’m reminded me that it caused a mini tempest for me too.

My crime then and Michael’s now is to in any way conflate PR with journalism. But of course it’s the elephant in the room.

Where The Truth Lies - first published lef’s remember before social media and when 24/7 did not mean 24 Nanosecond - was the first book to bring the two disciplines together and to argue then - as I do now - that both are “informationists” with faults and yet an equality of sorts: who was to say that the bad journalist who misled was morally better than the good PR?

There are differences. And there are degrees of journalism versus biographer versus character versus you name it.

But there are also uncomfortable truths.

Things that don’t totally fit the narrative. I’ve worked around both fields my working life - over forty years - and one is not morally superior to the other.

Maybe Monsieur Wolff is less consigliere than unusual whistleblower. Maybe he is no less trustworthy than the headline writer or the politician or the spinner who shitstirs behind the scenes?

Maybe he screwed up. Maybe he is so used to being the maverick who walks into rooms which - in a brilliant and moving piece by his wife

Victoria Wolff

often turn “chilly” that he cooled his self regulation when going into a persona to bring a monster to justice.

I don’t know. God knows, none of us should email or text with impunity and plenty of us have.

None of us should take the moral high ground on such uneven territory as truth and then media: not then, not now.

Oddly it is this book which got me invited to give the closing keynote next week in Prague at Central Europe’s largest media and advertising conference, Forum Media.

https://www.forummedia.cz/

Spooky timing.

Truth and Lies. Hmm.