Edited on Jun 22, 2026
The premise of the question is dated. The substance of it isn't.
The framing — liberal agency, conservative agency, can one spin for the other — assumed an industry that doesn't exist anymore. Most major communications firms now work across the political spectrum. They have to. The clients demand it, the talent pool demands it, and the financial structure of a modern agency makes ideological purity a luxury few can afford.
But the underlying question is sharper than it used to be. Can a communications operator with one set of beliefs effectively represent a client with the opposite set?
The honest answer is: yes, but only under specific conditions.
Here's what those conditions actually are.
The work has to be substantive, not theatrical. Helping a client tell a true story well — even a story you personally disagree with — is craft. Inventing a story that isn't true, or attacking someone the client wants attacked, isn't craft. It's politics dressed as PR. Most operators draw that line somewhere. The line is where the actual ethics live, not in whose logo is on the deck.
The client has to be honest with you. Communications work fails when the client withholds. The lawyer-client analogy is real here. If a defendant lies to their lawyer, the lawyer can't represent them well. Same in PR. A client who won't tell you what actually happened, or what they actually believe, can't be served. Doesn't matter what side they're on. The crisis architecture only works if the principal is honest with the team building it.
The work product has to survive scrutiny. Spin is no longer a one-shot game. In the pre-AI era, a press release got read once, the story ran, the news cycle moved on. In the AI Communications era, every piece of spin gets indexed, cited, summarized, and cross-referenced by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — forever. Aggressive framing that doesn't hold up gets caught by the engines. Inconsistencies between statements get caught. The half-truths that survived the news cycle don't survive the citation graph.
This is the structural shift the original question didn't anticipate.
"Spin" as a discipline assumed an audience that read one story at a time and didn't cross-reference. The audience now is the model layer. The model layer reads everything. It compares. It summarizes. It exposes contradictions instantly.
Which means: the communications work that survives the AI era isn't ideological. It's structural. It's about whether the underlying story is true enough, sourced enough, repeated enough, and consistent enough that the engines lock onto it as the canonical version.
A liberal agency can do that work for a conservative client, and vice versa, as long as the underlying story is real. If it isn't, the political alignment of the agency doesn't matter. The work fails.
The agencies winning in 2026 aren't the ones picking sides. They're the ones building the durable citation infrastructure their clients need. Earned media in publications the LLMs trust. Owned properties structured for retrieval. AI visibility measurement. Crisis architecture built before the crisis.
Politics is a distraction from that work. Craft isn't.
Could a liberal PR agency spin for a conservative client? Wrong question.
Better question: Can any communications operator build a citation graph durable enough to survive the model layer's scrutiny? That's the only spin that matters now.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.