It's not easy to decide either way. I recently advised a women's rights organization in a similar matter: they were poised to publish a scathing (and somewhat stupid) indictment of islam with regards to women's rights. It's obviously a minefield, with popular opinion divided almost equally.

You have to judge the intensity of emotions it will cause in people, the propensity of people to act on those emotions and the base desirability of the different groups.

In this case, they rightly passed on the 'opportunity' because it seemed as if the people who would agree were unlikely to donate to women's rights in the first place (and vice-versa).

(And because their employees threatened to collectively quit)

>Not if they were any good at their job.

That's close to the "No true scotchman" fallacy though.

Truth is, most PR persons in real life would not have gone this far against FBI in such a situation. Even if the "standing up" gave them some positive press, there would still be millions of conservative types giving them hell for not helping catch the bad guys.

In fact even progressives is not a given that they'd have applauded. Imagine if the FBI next asks Apple to help them with the phone of a rape/murder suspect, or the guy at Orlando.

Good PR is sort of like a Turing Test of being a decent human being; it cannot be differentiated from being a reasonable person.