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THIS WEEK’S NEWS
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Join the Fight to Stop Fake News!
2. Beware Industry-Funded Researchers on Drugs
3. Playing Public Diplomacy Games
4. Fast Food Feeding Frenzy
5. Message Control to Major Tom: Will NASA End Censorship?
6. Did PR’s “Pit Bull” Go After Greenpeace?
7. Big Bad Man in Baghdad
8. Fake TV News: See It and Stop It!
9. Pick McMe!
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== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. JOIN THE FIGHT TO STOP FAKE NEWS!
action.freepress.net/campaign/fakenews
Do you like being propagandized? If not, join the fight to stop fake news! As the Center for Media and Democracy reported last week, TV stations’ use of corporate-funded video news releases is widespread and undisclosed. Our colleagues at Free Press have made it easy for you to contact the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on this important issue. Please join us in asking the FCC to investigate TV stations’ abuse of the public airwaves, to clarify the disclosure requirements, and to penalize stations that break the law by deceiving their audience with undisclosed fake news. Act today, and ask five friends to do the same!
SOURCE: Free Press and Center for Media and Democracy, April 12, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4730
2. BEWARE INDUSTRY-FUNDED RESEARCHERS ON DRUGS
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101478.html
“Whichever company sponsors the trial produces the better antipsychotic drug,” researchers concluded in an American Journal of Psychiatry article. Psychiatrist John Davis and colleagues “analyzed every publicly available trial funded by the pharmaceutical industry pitting five new antipsychotic drugs against one another.” Not surprisingly, “nine in 10" trials claimed that “the best drug was the one made by the company funding the study.” Often, the problem is not outright fabrication. Some industry-funded studies “use too low a dose of a competitor’s drug, while others choose statistical techniques that show their drug in the best light.” Davis estimated “that 90 percent of industry-sponsored studies that boast a prominent academic as the lead author are conducted by a company that later enlists a university researcher as the ‘author.’” Davis told the Washington Post that in such cases, “the whole entire paper from start to finish is an advertisement.”
SOURCE: Washington Post, April 12, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4729
3. PLAYING PUBLIC DIPLOMACY GAMES
www.wired.com/news/culture/games/0,70443-0.html?tw=wn_index_4
The U.S. State Department and the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication are co-sponsoring a “Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition, which seeks to improve America’s reputation abroad,” reports Wired magazine. “Contestants must employ the principles of ‘public diplomacy’ while cooking up a video-game concept from scratch or creating an original ‘mod’ of an existing massively multiplayer online game.” USC professor Douglas Thomas said, “Public diplomacy must move away from a model that has been dominated by notions of propaganda, so we are looking to virtual worlds and games as a space where people can build something productive and focus on the experience of learning, interaction and play.” The U.S. government is also “licensing the technology” behind the America’s Army game, which cost $12 million to produce. New versions will stress “cultural awareness, negotiation skills and adaptive thinking,” or help soldiers “anticipate and counter terrorist and insurgent tactics.”
SOURCE: Wired News, March 27, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4726
4. FAST FOOD FEEDING FRENZY
“McDonald’s marketing generals have convened a war council and are hatching a strategy to combat a new attack,” reports Advertising Age. The “threat” they face is journalist and author Eric Schlosser. A movie based on Schlosser’s 2001 best-seller “Fast Food Nation” comes out later this year, as will his new book, which is aimed at younger readers, “Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food.” McDonald’s is “worried about a backlash,” reports AdAge. The fast food giant has “told franchisees that its communications will play up the company’s menu variety, new products, and community involvement to remind consumers of the chain’s more admirable activities.” The company is also involving “public relations, marketing, legal and advertising and PR agencies” in an “action plan to combat the obesity and trust issues that the Schlosser projects could raise to another level.” Schlosser told AdAge that he’s also “been attacked by people from the National Restaurant Association and the Center for Consumer Freedom.”
SOURCE: Advertising Age, April 3, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4724
5. MESSAGE CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM: WILL NASA END CENSORSHIP?
www.nasa.gov/pdf/145687main_information_policy.pdf
NASA is touting a more accessible public information policy after acknowledging that a political appointee in its public information department attempted to silence one of the agency’s experts on climate change. The new policy clarifies the right of NASA experts and others to express their own opinions on policies without political vetting. NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin says that the new policy will ensure that “(s)cientific and technical information concerning agency programs and projects will be accurate and unfiltered.” Washington D.C. watchdog OMBWatch isn’t so sure, stating that the new policy “sets the right tone” but “remains too vague and contains too many loopholes to fully function as a vehicle for public disclosure.” The policy does appear to resolve the original tempest: NASA physicist and climate expert James Hansen won’t be stopped from expressing his views to National Public Radio that the government isn’t acting aggressively enough to address global warming. The New York Times reported in January that a 26-year-old Bush appointee, George Deutsch, had blocked Hansen’s interview. Deutsch left the agency soon thereafter.
SOURCE: NASA, March 30, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4725
6. DID PR’S “PIT BULL” GO AFTER GREENPEACE?
www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_16/b3980101.htm
Greenpeace got IRS’s green light for continued nonprofit tax status last month after an audit, but the whodunit continues, especially in the business press. Did the Exxon Mobil-funded Public Interest Watch (PIW) draw in IRS? Does the trail lead to secretive spinmasters Dezenhall Resources, which, reports Eamon Javers, helped create PIW in 2002 with the express purpose of challenging Greenpeace’s tax status? Before Business Week, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page piece pointing the finger at PIW, and noting that $120,000 of PIW’s 2003-2004 budget came from Exxon Mobil, historically Greenpeace’s biggest target. Business Week now answers the mystery of PIW’s braintrust: “two of PIW’s three founding board members are former Dezenhall employees: James McCarthy and Christopher Meyers.” Whoever done it, IRS concluded in its March, 2006 letter that Greenpeace did suffer from nine deficiencies in its activites, including unspecified illegal acts. According to the Journal, IRS allowed Greenpeace to maintain its tax exempt status because the illegal activities “weren’t Greenpeace’s primary purpose.”
SOURCE: Business Week, April 17, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4723
7. BIG BAD MAN IN BAGHDAD
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR2006040900890.html
Inflating the importance of Abu Musab al Zarqawi as a leader of the Iraqi rebellion is the object of a US goverment propaganda plan, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. According to Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways.” Al Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency is being heralded in Iraq through leaflets, radio and TV broadcasts, and postings on the internet. While the program is purportedly aimed at an Iraqi audience, it has also bled back into the US media market, in part thanks to an intentional leak to an American journalist, Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. In a briefing prepared for Army General George W. Casey, Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, the “home audience” is identified as one of the six major targets of the war information.
SOURCE: Washington Post, April 10, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4727
8. FAKE TV NEWS: SEE IT AND STOP IT!
www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary
Who’s behind your news? Without disclosure, you just don’t know if the report you’re watching about a corporation was secretly funded by and produced for that corporation.
That’s what the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) found in our groundbreaking exposé, “Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed.” This multi-media report is the culmination of an intensive, ten month investigation by CMD. It provides the most extensive account to date of how corporate-funded video news releases — fake TV news — are routinely aired, without disclosure, as though they were independent news reports.
Learn which TV stations we caught and watch footage of the VNRs we tracked, plus see how TV newscasts incorporated them and/or related satellite media tour “interviews,” by reading our online report, here: www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary
And then tell the Federal Communications Commission that fake news must stop, by taking part in a joint CMD / Free Press action, here: action.freepress.net/campaign/fakenews
SOURCE: Center for Media and Democracy, April 6, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4718
9. PICK MCME!
www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-mcdonalds
-packaging,1,5376658.story?coll=chi-business-hed
Celebrity spokemodels are out, and burger-munching everypeople are in under the golden arches. By visiting McDonald’s Global Casting Call website, fast food lovers from anywhere in the world can submit a photo and short essay in any of 16 languages. The competition will undoubtedly be fierce, with applicants being judged on the written and visual submissions that best capture the “I’m lovin’ it” spirit with themes of “inspiration, passion and fun.” It’s a cheap ad campaign for McDonald’s. Winners will be flown, with a friend, to London for a photo shoot, and will be housed and fed at the expense of McDonald’s, but no mention is made of actual pay. Being featured on McDonald’s packaging will have to be reward enough. Venus Williams would probably say that it is. She is quoted in a McDonald’s press release as saying “Even though I’ve won major tennis tournaments, been on television, radio and numerous magazine covers, seeing my picture on McDonald’s packaging was one of the coolest and most exciting moments of my life – I literally beamed when I saw it.”
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4714
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