[maxlin]

>Are you critiquing the writer's PR savvy -- that they should know that progressive references can both help and hurt them, due to political polarization?

Yes. This is something that appears extremely defensive / conflict-seeking and just increases the chance of escalation. It's the kind of similar thing if they wrote something like "an engineering firm where 70% of the engineers have proudly summitted Mount Everest, something most people are only hope to do", that has zero relevance to the issue at hand but by default sets a setting where they are trying to appear somehow holier-than-thou and whatever they say is put under undue scrutiny even if that is the only snafu.

In making clarifications like this, one must be as possibly humble as they can and only talk about things with immediate relevance to the issue. That should be so unbelievably obvious. What they say on their frontpage, like trying to give some "vibe" might be something else of course, and doesn't as necessarily have to do with their craft. This PR person confused these two and should probably be fired, for the same reasons of doing the opposite of their job as for example some Helldivers 2 community manager semi-recently did. If a golden retriever in their position would do less damage, they are not the person for the job.

[neilv]

Good point about relevance.

I can make a few guesses why they put it out there (including, but not limited to, a kind of defensive signal "please hear us out, we're good people here", which would be understandable, since they're threatened).

But it's predictably inviting both biased/triggered negative reactions, as well as other people who wonder why you're leading with that when allegations are about something else.

I'm not a PR expert, so I can only guess at what all nuances they have to juggle. As a person, I imagine the situation has been pretty rough on a number of people.