"There is such a thing as bad publicity"
About this Quote
The line lands like a pin in the balloon of a media-age mantra: that any attention is good attention. Joyce Brothers, a TV-friendly psychologist who made her career translating therapeutic insight into mass-market advice, is quietly warning that reputation is not a scoreboard where points are always points. In a culture that treats visibility as virtue, she insists on a more clinical reality: attention can condition the audience against you, not for you.
The intent is corrective. “There is such a thing” reads almost parental, a gentle scolding aimed at publicists, celebrities, and ordinary people learning to perform themselves. Brothers is pushing back on the cynical PR logic that controversy automatically converts into sales or power. She’s also diagnosing a psychological mechanism: repeated negative exposure doesn’t just inform; it primes. People begin to associate your name with threat, dishonesty, or instability. Once that association hardens, “clarifying” rarely works because the feeling arrives before the facts.
The subtext is moral as much as strategic. Bad publicity isn’t merely inconvenient; it can erode trust, which is the real currency of public life. You can win the news cycle and lose the room. Coming from Brothers, the line also reflects her era’s media transition: the rise of television personalities, tabloid churn, and the early architecture of today’s outrage economy. She’s describing the moment when fame stopped being a byproduct and became a business model - and reminding us that the model has a failure mode.
The intent is corrective. “There is such a thing” reads almost parental, a gentle scolding aimed at publicists, celebrities, and ordinary people learning to perform themselves. Brothers is pushing back on the cynical PR logic that controversy automatically converts into sales or power. She’s also diagnosing a psychological mechanism: repeated negative exposure doesn’t just inform; it primes. People begin to associate your name with threat, dishonesty, or instability. Once that association hardens, “clarifying” rarely works because the feeling arrives before the facts.
The subtext is moral as much as strategic. Bad publicity isn’t merely inconvenient; it can erode trust, which is the real currency of public life. You can win the news cycle and lose the room. Coming from Brothers, the line also reflects her era’s media transition: the rise of television personalities, tabloid churn, and the early architecture of today’s outrage economy. She’s describing the moment when fame stopped being a byproduct and became a business model - and reminding us that the model has a failure mode.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Joyce
Add to List
