MEDIA: CHAOS THEORY

Mitchell Jackson, a once-canceled journalist, is comfortable with controversy—his own and that of his incendiary clients

Natalie Korach

MITCHELL JACKSON arrived at The Odeon 10 minutes early for our photo shoot, getting out of his Uber with headphones on foraphone call. With a large coffee in hand and an L.L. Bean tote embroidered with "Cancelled" over his shoulder, the PR strategist and crisis consultant took a lap around the block, finishing his phone call privately, before meeting in front of the Tribeca restaurant. "I hate this," he says of the attention, before politely introducing himself to the photographer, whom he towered over in black Doc Martens boots.

Being in front of the camera and the subject of a story is uncomfortable for Jackson. A self-described "interloper," the 33-year-old PR pro is accustomed to working behind the scenes on behalf of high-profile and provocative clients such as Candace Owens, Brett Cooper, Adam Friedland, Caroline Calloway, and Adamzz. "I gravitate toward clientele that have something to say because otherwise Td be bored," Jackson tells me, adding, " The idea of working with Pod Save America makes me want to gouge my eyes out."

Jackson occupies a unique space in today's combustible internet news cycle, where reams of outrage can cut short a budding media career—or propel one to new heights. A journalist once canceled for consorting with members of the farright media, with a voting record that includes backing Ron DeSantis and Joe Biden, Jackson is thriving in the chaos that comes with repping conservative podcasters and contrarian comedians while also managing various A-list crises.

Though he generally sticks to the shadows, a recent New York Times profile of Cooper, the conservative YouTube star and Fox News contributor, noted how her "publicist" had "enticed a whole row of reporters" to watch her perform at a New York comedy club earlier this year.

I was one of them, and in dealing with Jackson regarding various personalities, I've become accustomed to his frenetic fashion, rushing from one meeting to another, almost always on the phone. We were at a Broadway show once, and he left his seat multiple times during the performance to field calls. Sitting down for lunch at The Odeon, he was just as efficient, immediately ordering a water, an Earl Grey tea, and a cappuccino at the server's first appearance.

"Do the gotchas first," he says when I turn my phone on to record the conversation. "I used to save them for the end when I was a reporter," Jackson continues, referencing his past. "You'd wait till the end to ask Rachel Dolezal if she's white."

"I don't have any gotcha questions," I laugh, making a mental note to ask Jackson if there's anyone that has gone too far for even him to consider working with.

Prior to his PR business, BCG Communications, Jackson wrote about some divisive characters for Vice, including Dolezal, Ann Coulter, and Paris Hilton. " I think all of my clients are people I would have covered," he says. As both a reporter and a PR strategist, Jackson benefited, in his words, from being a "little tism-y " and as a result being particularly blunt. "I think it actually opens people up more. I'm not judgmental." He says Vice was more permissive than media outlets today, allowing or even encouraging an immersive gonzo journalism style. "We slept at the Bunny Ranch. I slept at the Sausage Castle."

"I'm not a Svengali. I'M NOT A PUPPET MASTER. Fin just practical in responding to what works."

"There was stuff I did at Vice that I did not want to do," he says. "I was there from 20 to 25," having started working for the media company while still attending Sarah Lawrence College, Jackson recounts. "Iwas a baby." One of the things Jackson is referring to, which he says his bosses permitted, ultimately led to his firing from the company and a full-scale media cancellation.

In October 2017, Jackson, whose last name was then Sunderland (he took his husband's last name after getting married) , was outed by BuzzFeed- for being part of a long-running email chain created to mock the early stages of the woke movement on the internet. The group included far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos, once a Breitbart editor. "Please mock this fat feminist," one unearthed email read from Jackson to Yiannopoulos in reference to a Times columnist.

"I drove traffic, whether that was me, with my bosses' permission, sending opposition media our story so they'd make fun of them, or I had a good instinct for what would sell," Jackson says. The day after the BuzzFeed story was published, Vice fired Jackson.

"That era when he left Vice was such a different time culturally," says independent journalist Taylor Lorenz, who has known Jackson since his time at Vice and covers many of his current clients. "I actually think if that scandal had happened now, I don't think he would have lost his job or been pushed out. Conservative media would rally around something like that."

WHILE THE EMAILS ultimately cost Jackson his job, he saw a cultural shift in the works. "There was a mind virus in 2017, where everyone thought the world was going," Jackson says, using a catchphrase beloved by the likes of Elon Musk. "Anyone who has read American history or American pop-culture history would have known that woke was never going to last forever." He argues that while it was partially a gut instinct to lean into his cancellation and away from woke trends, it is also the cycle of American pop culture dating back to P.T. Barnum. "Controversy and irreverence have always been what works," Jackson says.

"Some people have accused me of being part of the degradation of Western culture or whatever, which I take as a compliment," Jackson says of his second career in communications. "I'm not a Svengali. I'm not a puppet master. I'm just practical in responding to what works. It's like, 'Okay, I got canceled. I need to work.' Practical." Jackson's business is referral-only, and he has amassed an impressive client list, which he in part attributes to his ability to maintain long-standing relationships.

Jackson first met Calloway a decade ago after assigning a story about her Instagram presence. The two kept in touch until Jackson was fired from Vice, and he says Calloway stopped speaking to him. She later apologized and they made amends, he says, with Jackson advising Calloway on the release of her self-published book, Scammer. Years earlier, Calloway had been reeling from the fallout of backing out of her book deal, a former friend taking credit for editing her Instagram captions and cowriting her book proposal, and hosting a series of live events that drew comparisons to Eyre Festival.

"I did push Caroline," he says, to publish her book at the same time as one by Natalie Beach, who claimed to be Calloway's ghostwriter. Calloway tells me that while Jackson did suggest the timeline, it didn't change her plans whatsoever, considering there was "no world in which I would have let her book come out before mine, so we were already on the same page before he said anything."

"Mitchell" made a brief cameo in Lili Anolik's 2023 profile of Calloway for Vault)) Fair. For this story, I asked Calloway about her relationship with Jackson, which she says, after being friends for a decade, "There is no one whose perspective on media I value more!"

Jackson says, "it's definitely a collaboration," adding that Calloway is good at handling press on her own as well. "She would have been a good publicist, honestly. I think Candace would be a great publicist also," he added.

Owens, Jackson says, has a very clear vision when it comes to content. "She follows her interests. Every day it's a surprise what the show's gonna be. That's the fun of it," he says. "What people don't understand about Candace is that her audience is millennial moms. She has taken the place in the culture—like her show comes out at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard, which is the same time Ricki Lake and Oprah used to be on," Jackson continues. "She is daytime television for millennial moms."

Jackson touted the recent coverage of Owens, including an appearance on Theo Yon's podcast and coverage in The Wall Street Journal for being the number three podcast in downloads and views across platforms earlier this year, according to Podscribe. "Those, to me, are wins," he says. "There's people who look down on me or look down on this, but they write about it every day."

Owens's success, of course, has come with its fair share of controversy, such as her 2024 suspension from YouTube after sharing an interview with Kanye West that included antisemitic content. More recently, in July, French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, filed a lawsuit against Owens for defamation over her conspiratorial claims about the couple, including that the first lady of France was born a biological male. [Editor's note: There is absolutely no reason to think Brigitte Macron is anyone other than who she says she is.]

In a statement, a spokesperson for Owens accused Brigitte Macron of "trying to bully a reporter into submission" and said she will "not [be] shutting up." And Jackson responded to the suit, "Today we have the legal court and the court of public opinion. I live to defend the First Amendment for independent creators. The Macron story is now a freespeech story."

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Jackson's guiding philosophy is that "divisiveness is key," which Owens shares. "Some people have to love you, but some people have to hate you," he argues. The secret to longevity in the spotlight is leaning into the controversy. "The people who hate her and send out clips every week to the 10 same Twitter accounts are really helpful for promoting the show," Jackson quips. "I don't want them to stop."

Given clients like Owens and Cooper, you might infer something about Jackson's politics, though he says he's voted for Democrats and Republicans. "Tm an independent," he says. "I think Trump is a con man. I grew up in Florida, so I have a pretty good understanding of a con man when I see one. There's so many things about Trump that are actually the worst parts of Democrats. Not paying their bills on time, that's a Democrat. I don't think he won because of racism. He won for the same reason Zohran [Mamdani] won, which is that a lot of people are struggling to get by."

" T ve ne ve r ide ntified with e ithe r party," he adds. " I deal with both enough to know that they're both bullshit. I know how the sausage gets made."

"The thing about Mitchell is he recognizes that it's all a game," Lorenz says. " He is able to position his clients and work with the press effectively because he understands their goals." Given his brush with cancellation, "he's not a Pollyanna and he recognizes the bad-faith stuff, but he also knows the value of attention and how to manipulate attention online," adds Lorenz, who has seen her share of online drama, "it's really valuable because comms people, a lot of them, don't understand the way the internet is and how to leverage negative attention for subscribers."

The ability to harness negative attention for a positive outcome was preached to Jackson from an early age throughout his "turbulent childhood," he explains to me casually over lunch. His parents' pet store just outside Miami was regularly protested by animal advocacy groups, which his mother leaned into.

"it was actually going to go out of business and the protests resurrected it because she turned it into a circus," Jackson recalls. "She had counterprotesters." As a child, Jackson says, he saw the "long game" in gaining and maintaining attention. His mother used to say, "You'll never starve in America if you're shameless. Only prideful people starve," he adds, which sounds quite a bit like the motivating factor of his clientele.

Meanwhile, Jackson's childhood allowed him to learn how to thrive under chaotic circumstances. "I actually feel more stressed when things are calm," he says. "That also makes me give much more rational advice to my clients because I'm not operating out of a place of panic." This is a crucial skill for crisis management, which he provides to many clients, considering himself somewhat of a "Rick Rubin of controversy or a Yoda of scandal."

SOMETIMES WHAT SHOULD bearoutine PR job for Jackson devolves into a crisis situation. One such situation was when he was put on retainer to help Maya Henry, Liam Payne's ex-fiancee, with promotion for her book. In early October 2024, Henry accused Payne, of One Direction fame, of obsessive behavior, and so when Jackson got a call from TMZ that month, he assumed it was related to a crime. "Then they were like no, we need help identifying a body," which turned out to be Payne. TMZ was one of the first to report Payne's de ath at 31 afte r he fe 11 fro m a hote 1 balcony in Argentina. The outlet immediately drew outrage and ethical questions after publishing and then deleting photos showing portions of Payne's body while reporting on the incident.

In that circumstance, anything Henry said "was going to be taken out of context right away," Jackson argues. "The fans are the fans." His role in managing that crisis mostly included "batting down reporters" and eventually providing a statement to a prominent outlet, in this case Rolling Stone, to "try to change the narrative." When reflecting on the crisis, Jackson says it was the "hardest thing" he's dealt with throughout his career, given Henry and Payne's complicated relationship.

Even considering the hard work that goes into managing crises for high-profile clients, Jackson torches the celebrity PR firms that are risk-averse and decide to drop clients who enter a crisis situation, calling the move "unethical." He argues that you shouldn't "consider yourself a publicist if you can't handle a crisis." Celebrities spend a significant amount of money on their PR team, and "the second they have a scandal, get out of town?" he continues. "I think that's really fucked up."

Meanwhile, he argues that publicists at large firms are "obsessed with control" rather than "their clients' best interests," adding that they failed to realize how the PR machine was changing around them. "You have more control when you surrender control," he says of the current media ecosystem. "You're going to control some fashion magazine five people read? You can't control TikTok. You can't control House Inhabit," Jackson says, referring to Instagrammer and Substacker Jessica Reed Kraus.

In a PR situation, "yougetthe card you're dealt and you have to play that card. You can't try to play a different card, otherwise you're just going to lose," Jackson says. One example he used to explain the concept was Amber Heard, who failed to reshape the narrative into one casting her as a victim of Johnny Depp. In a defamation lawsuit, Depp was able to turn the public opinion against his ex-wife Heard, winning more than $10 million in damages over an opinion essay she published in The Washington Post in 2018. (Depp, through his attorney, was found to have defamed Heard in one of three counts in her countersuit.)

"She should have made fun of herself," Jackson argues. "She should have covered herself in chocolate on SNL. Everyone would have laughed. Everyone would have forgiven her. Making fun of yourself is very powerful."

Heard would be a dream client for Jackson, and he'd also love to rep Jojo Siwa, Madonna, the Metropolitan Opera, and the state of Israel. "I think I could do wonders for Israel, if they would listen," Jackson says, adding that he thinks the country has the "biggest PR problem of the moment." Still, Jackson will draw a line, saying he wouldn't work with provocative Free Press founder Bari Weiss. " Tm in the relationship-building business," he says, "not the bridge-burning business."