Molly McPherson breaks down Amanda Hirsch's apology over a Polymarket controversy. Hirsch hosts a joint podcast with Polymarket called What Are the Odds, so she can't criticize the company and ends up taking the fall alone. Neither Dear Media nor Polymarket has said anything publicly, leaving the apology to look misdirected and weak.
She's not saying it as a content creator. I would argue that she's saying it as an employee of Dear Media because Dear Media is in partnership with Polymarket. And it's not just the ad. You may or may not know that Polymarket and Dear Media are teaming up for a weekly podcast called What Are the Odds? This podcast, I believe, started in June. But the idea of the podcast is it's a weekly podcast that blends celebrity news, internet moments, and real-time prediction data. So it has rotating hosts. Amanda Hirsch happens to be one of the hosts of the podcast. So now there's another entity that she represents. So she can't come out and ding Polymarket. She has to fall on the sword because Polymarket Isn't just sponsoring The Real. They are a collaborator and a brand partner with Amanda Hirsch's employer, Dear Media. So it's much bigger than that. So I'm arguing in that apology that Amanda Hirsch is apologizing for what she had to do. So that's why I believe what she's saying, but she had to take the hit for it. It's really Dear Media is the one who should be responding to this crisis because Dear Media partnered with Polymarket. We haven't heard anything from Dear Media. We haven't heard anything from Polymarket at all about this because they don't want to talk about it because it's a collaboration. That's why they made Amanda Hirsch fall on the sword. And the reason why the apology falls flat, not just for me as a crisis manager, look at the public. Everyone else knows why it's falling flat. It's falling flat because they're not apologizing for the right thing.
