Good PR

Although once upon a time seen as a dieting fad or an extreme way of living, veganism is now becoming more of a lifestyle choice and one of the mainstream approaches to food.

One of the biggest pizza chains has this week joined the likes of Pizza Express and Zizzi to offer customers vegan-cheese pizzas. Pizza Hut was already trialling vegan cheese made by Violife (good PR for that brand too) at five of its restaurants, including Bluewater, Crawley, Thanet, Canterbury and Clatham; and the trial went so well that as of Wednesday 29 November, the vegan pizzas are available in all 262 Pizza Hut restaurants across the UK.

The bad news is that they will only be available in the restaurants and not from the takeaway branches and there’s a £1 supplement for the vegan versions, but that hasn’t stopped some pretty impressive press coverage for the brand.

I spotted the vegan Pizza Hut story on the Metro first of all and then had a quick look to see where else it had landed, which included the likes of the Daily Mail, The Independent, loads of regional mentions and on food titles like Delish. The move also won Pizza Hut praise from PETA, which is pretty tough to do!

As a vegetarian trying to make the move into veganism (cheese is a BIG part of my life) this is welcome news for me!

Bad PR

Donald Trump has, rather unsurprisingly, behaved in a very non-presidential way yet again; and has surely edged closer to that (I hope) looming impeachment.  

So, what’s he done this time? Well, earlier in the week news outlets reported on the US President’s unprofessional and hatred-spreading Twitter activity. Trump retweeted three posts made by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the far-right group Britain First.

All three posts featured a video; one of which was captioned “Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary”, another that said “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death” and a third with the message “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!”.

The President apparently came to know about the videos via one of the 45 people he follows – the conservative political commentator and author Ann Coulter, who had previously tweeted the video of the boy on crutches being attacked. 

Once Trump had retweeted Jayda, she posted a message about the fact he had done so, saying “The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has retweeted three of deputy leader Jayda Fransen's Twitter videos! Donald Trump himself has retweeted these videos and has around 44 million followers! God bless you Trump! God bless America!!”

As well as appearing on her verified account, the same message was also posted on the Britain First leader’s account (Paul Golding) and the unverified Britain First account. Behaving in such a way that spreads hatred is not how a President should act and these anti-Muslim videos aren’t the kind of content a person expects to see in the feed of a country’s leader.

The story has been doing the rounds this week on the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, Telegraph, CNN and more titles around the world.

Written by Shannon Peerless, 10 Yetis @ShazzaYeti on Twitter
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