News & Insights

Business Response to the Charlottesville Protests

As Weber Shandwick has done in the wake of other corporate responses to White House statements, we began tracking responses immediately after CEOs began speaking out about the 2017 Charlottesville protests and the president’s response, which condemned violence on “both sides.”

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As part of Weber Shandwick’s ongoing CEO activism research, we monitored responses to these protests. We tracked 64 CEO and company responses within one week of the protests in Charlottesville. We found 77 percent of these messages came from CEOs, founders or managing partners. One-third (32 percent) of the responses mentioned President Trump, and of those, 81 percent were negative and 19 percent were neutral in tone. Half mentioned racism, white supremacy or domestic terrorism.

Click here for our full analysis and here for additional Weber Shandwick research on CEO activism.