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THE WEEKLY SPIN, April 5, 2006
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THIS WEEK’S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. From Russia with Spin
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Wal-Mart: Low Prices, PR Triage
2. Wired
3. Old Politics in New Media
4. PR Overbilling Case Heads To Court
5. Lobby Shop With A Non-Profit Front
6. Frequent Flying Regulators
7. Lincoln’s Planted Stories
8. White House Damage Control
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== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. FROM RUSSIA WITH SPIN
by Judith Siers-Poisson
All is not champagne and caviar in Moscow. Pro-Putin political forces are concerned that the West — particularly the US — is growing increasingly distant from President Vladmir Putin and the current Russian administration.
One response has been to promote Russia as a willing and able partner in the war on terrorism. Unfortunately, according to a Washington Post article by Anna Politkovskaya, the cases of terrorism are often fabricated through confessions obtained through torture. She relates the condition of one Chechen prisoner who has not surprisingly confessed to all the charges “suggested” to him. “[He] is now severely disabled: Both his legs were broken under torture; his kneecaps were shattered; his kidneys badly damaged by beating; his genitalia mutilated; his eyesight lost; his eardrums torn; and all of his front teeth sawed off.” Lest we think this goes on in secret, that is how he appeared in court.
For the rest of this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4708
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. WAL-MART: LOW PRICES, PR TRIAGE
www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/business/media/30walmart.html?_r=1&n=
Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fB%2fBarbaro%2
Sam Walton just might be spinning in his grave. He was said to detest public relations, preferring to let Wal-Mart products and services speak for themselves. Under the new regime, PR has taken on a special urgency, with company officials locking into a political campaign-like “war room” mentality to respond to critics of its labor and big box store siting strategies. Now comes word that the company is looking for “triage” and “emergency response” talent in its next key hires. Michael Barbaro reported that the executive search firm Crowe-Innes & Associates has been engaged to help find a director of media relations who can manage a “crisis communications program” and “triage” such crises “in rapid response mode.” Hours of work: up to “24/7" according to the posting, which was released to the Times by one of Wal-Mart’s biggest critics, Wal-Mart Watch. A second job posting seeks a candidate who can address “high profile political activities” and “operate successfully in a campaign mode.” Wal-Mart does not seem to worry about low prices when it comes to high level PR: In November, 2005, the Times reported that the company had hired the Edelman public relations firm, including ex-advisers from the camps of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and John Kerry.
SOURCE: New York Times, March 30, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4712
2. WIRED
www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=1499059
Common Cause has produced a report, titled “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” which describes some of the astroturf front groups that have been created by the cable, telephone and internet industry to lobby for legislation favorable to corporate interests. Groups such as Consumers for Cable Choice, FreedomWorks, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, New Millennium Research Council, Frontiers of Freedom, Keep It Local NJ, Internet Innovation Alliance and MyWireless.org “accept subsidies or grants from corporate interests to lobby or produce research when they normally might not, but too often fail to disclose the connection between their policy positions and their bank accounts. … These sorts of campaigns are dangerous for our democracy. They deliberately mislead citizens, and they deliberately mislead our lawmakers, who are already charged with the difficult task of making sense of complex telecommunications policies.”
SOURCE: Common Cause
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4707
3. OLD POLITICS IN NEW MEDIA
www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/washington/02campaign.html
Political campaigns in the United States are using the internet as never before, reports Adam Nagourney. Unfortunately, some of the new technologies are being deployed in service of the same old dirty politics as ever, including attack ads and stealth campaigns: “Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign.” Nagourney notes that campaigns are also “studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests.”
SOURCE: New York Times, April 2, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4706
4. PR OVERBILLING CASE HEADS TO COURT
www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-dowie3apr03,1,3995766.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california
The trial of Douglas R. Dowie and John Stodder, two former executives with the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard (F-H) executives, commences this week over allegations that they overbilled the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power by approximately $325,000. Dowie and Stodder have pleaded not guilty. Dowie is also suing F-H alleging that he was sacked, the Los Angeles Times reports, in a bid to conceal a “larger scandal involving the laundering of illegal campaign contributions to Los Angeles politicians.” F-H rejects the claim.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2006.
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4705
5. LOBBY SHOP WITH A NON-PROFIT FRONT
www.sptimes.com/2006/04/02/Worldandnation/For_price__watchdog_w.shtml
Ron Campbell, a lobbyist from SPS Consultants, successfully ran Mexican avocado growers campaign in 2004 to expand access to the U.S. market. To overcome opposition from Californian avocado growers Campbell gave Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) $100,000 to generate a ‘grassroots’ lobbying campaign to support his clients. “California has 6,000 growers. We went to CAGW and said, “We need at least 6,000 or 7,000 comments to counter that,” Campbell told the St. Petersburg Times. It is just one of a number of campaigns that CAGW has run to benefit its donors. Bill Adair reports that CAGW took at least $245,000 from tobacco companies “while urging the federal government not to regulate tobacco and to drop a lawsuit against the industry”. CAGW was also funded by Diageo North America, “a major liquor company, and wrote letters to Congress opposing government regulation of flavored malt beverages, which Diageo makes.”
SOURCE: St. Petersburg Times, April 2, 2006.
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4704
6. FREQUENT FLYING REGULATORS
www.publicintegrity.org/rx/printer-friendly.aspx?aid=792
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy that precludes employees from accepting trips paid for by companies the agency regulates is easily side-stepped. Alexander Cohen reports that non-profit groups that “draw their members, their boards and even some of their funding from medical and pharmaceutical-related companies” paid for roughly one-third of the 3,600 sponsored trips received by hundreds of FDA employees since 1999. “The sponsor of the most trips was the Drug Information Association, which footed the bill for more than 600 trips taken by FDA employees,” Cohen reports. Employees of The Weinberg Group, a PR company which boasts that it helps to defend clients “products in the courts and the media”, have close ties to the DIA. One of its employees delivered a presentation to last years DIA annual meeting titled “FDA Enforcement: What You Need to Know to Avoid or Respond to the FDA.”
SOURCE: Center for Public Integrity, March 30, 2006.
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4698
7. LINCOLN’S PLANTED STORIES
news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article354473.ece
The Independent has published examples of some of the fake “newspaper articles” that the Lincoln Group paid to place in Iraqi newspapers. Andrew Buncombe shows how the articles were full of claims that contrasted sharply with reality on the ground at the time they were published. “Furthermore,” he writes, “it has been alleged that quotations contained within these reports and others – attributed to anonymous Iraqi officials or citizens – were routinely made up by US troops who never went beyond the perimeter of the Green Zone. What seems clear is that, taken by themselves, these reports would provide an unbalanced picture of the situation inside Iraq where ongoing violence wreaks daily chaos and horror.”
SOURCE: Independent (UK), March 30, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4694
8. WHITE HOUSE DAMAGE CONTROL
news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm
“Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush’s 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration,” the National Journal’s Murray Waas writes in a revealing article on White House damage-control efforts. The Bush administration’s campaign to counter charges that it “misrepresented intelligence information to make the case for war had three major components,” Murray reports, “blame the CIA for the use of the Niger information in the president’s State of the Union address; discredit and undermine Joseph Wilson; and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong.”
SOURCE: National Journal, March 30, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4688
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