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sponsored by the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy SHARE US WITH A FRIEND (OR FIFTY FRIENDS) www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- == BLOG POSTINGS == == SPIN OF THE DAY == == BLOG POSTINGS == 1. WHY ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS WANTS US TO FORGIVE AND FORGET The strategy behind the late Friday afternoon news dump is simple: most media outlets will be squeezed for space to cover a late-breaking story, looming deadlines will ensure harried journalists don’t have time to get much further than the executive summary, and by the time Monday rolls around, it will be seen as stale news by editors with the attention span of a gnat. Reading the 20-page report, which was prompted by Greg Toppo’s expos√© on the Williams contract in USA Today, it’s easy to see why the Education Department wanted to bury it. The report chronicles the deception, bungling and mismanagement behind the Williams contract. == SPIN OF THE DAY == 1. JOB OPENING FOR CMD WEBMASTER The Center for Media and Democracy is looking for a webmaster to help develop its online activism projects, including the PR Watch website (www.prwatch.org) and SourceWatch (www.sourcewatch.org). Candidates should have a strong knowledge of HTML, PHP and MySQL, as well as some experience with CSS. Experience in online activism and fundraising is also strongly desired, and experience with open source software including specifically Civicspace/Drupal and MediaWiki is helpful. For a detailed job description, visit www.prwatch.org/webmaster. Please send resume and letter of application by May 27 to: CMD, 520 University Ave., Suite 227, Madison, WI 53703; email editor@prwatch.org. No phone calls, please. 2. MEDIA TRAINING BOOMS IN MIDDLE EAST “Newsroom managers throughout the Middle East recognize the need for improved standards among the region’s journalists, and training programs are proliferating,” writes Gordon Robinson, director of the Middle East Media Project, in the summary to his report “Tasting Western Journalism: Media Training in the Middle East.” (PDF) Robinson finds that media training is turning into a “large and growing business” paid for, in part, by U.S. funds, including the Departments of State and Defense, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International Republican Institute. Britain, the European Union and Japan also support media training programs as well as private foundations like John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. “Some, however, question the utility of it all. By some estimates as much as $30 million was spent on media training in the Balkans and, by some accounts, things are worse now than they were before the well-meaning Westerners arrived. Moreover, the training environment in the Middle East now involves many of those same players. So in the Middle East, it needs to be asked when the money is spent, what the trainees really will take back to their newsrooms,” Robinson writes. 3. FAKE NEWS AS FREE SPEECH PR Week reports on the video news release industry’s response to Senator Byrd’s one-year measure and the Truth in Broadcasting Act, both of which require disclaimers for pre-packaged “news” segments. The CEO of D S Simon Productions believes “the temporary amendment was preferable to the permanent ban because it is tied to specific spending.” The CEO of Medialink said of the Truth in Broadcasting Act, “I think this is a law written by people not in the broadcasting or PR business,” and warned that the legislation “could limit free speech.” The president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association called the legislation “unnecessary,” since the “accepted standard is to clearly identify material from outside sources.” She also said that “government regulation of news content” would be “unprecedented and unconstitutional.” 4. “ECOMAGINATION”: BEYOND ELECTRIC General Electric began “heavily advertising” its “new company-wide environmental initiative” called “ecomagination.” Its goals are “to decrease pollution from its products and to double research and development spending on cleaner technologies.” (According to Grist” target=”_blank”>Grist, one TV ad “features scantily clad models dusted with soot,” as an announcer says, “Thanks to emissions-reducing technologies from GE, the power of coal is getting more beautiful every day.”) The “ecomagination” launch followed a year of “planning and packaging,” and was assisted by Edelman, O’Dwyer’s reported. Some environmentalists “praised the effort for having measurable performance targets” and addressing global warming. The Sierra Club’s Hudson River Program was less enthusiastic. “When you scratch beneath the public relations surface, I’m afraid they have unfinished business in terms of environmental protection,” said director Chris Ballantyn, referring to GE’s stalling on cleaning up PCBs that leaked into the Hudson from its factories. 5. WEIRD SCIENCE “It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change,” writes George Monbiot. He traces a claim by botanist David Bellamy, that the world’s glaciers “are not shrinking but in fact are growing.” The World Glacier Monitoring Service verified to Monbiot that “most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.” Monbiot tracks Bellamy’s claim to a self-published book by a “former architect,” then to a Lyndon LaRouche-associated magazine, then to online mentions by climate change skeptic Professor Fred Singer, the Cooler Heads Coalition and National Center for Public Policy Research, among others. Singer cites a 1989 Science article, which, according to Monbiot, doesn’t exist. Finally, Bellamy misrepresented his faulty source, due to a typing error. The UK Times also reports on bad science – a study funded by Dow Chemical Company claiming their employees have “favourable mortality patterns” compared to the general population, despite high incidences of “an asbestos-related lung cancer.” 6. PRO-NUCLEAR RHETORIC MELTDOWN As predicted, the British government has launched a post-election push for more nuclear power stations. The Director-General of Energy Policy advised incoming ministers to raise the issue now, as “it is generally easier to push ahead on controversial issues early in a new parliament.” The Nuclear Industry Association is lobbying for ten new reactors, “to combat climate change.” The Independent reports that one-third of the members of the British Committee on Radioactive Waste Management “have serious conflicts of interest.” Four of 12 members are paid consultants to firms employed by the committee. Yet, “Ministers recognise that to gain public support for a pro-nuclear policy, they first have to resolve the problem of what to do with existing nuclear waste.” The New York Times reports that nuclear energy will not reduce oil imports, as President Bush has claimed, because less than three percent of oil consumed in the United States goes towards electricity production. 7. AVOIDING NON-COMBAT (NOT NON-COMBATANT) DEATHS Concerned at rising rates of soldiers’ non-combat deaths, the U.S. Army Combat Readiness Center hired two PR firms, Pario and Reingold, to “sell” safety measures. The three-year, $800,000 campaign will include “brochures, web teasers, and movie trailers to play in the Army theater,” as well as messages for “the Army’s news and television services.” In its research, Pario found that “safety messages don’t resonate with young people who believe they are invincible, but they are still concerned about the safety of their peers.” Pario’s CEO said, “Don’t let your unit down – that’s what resonates. It’s safety, but we do it without saying safety.” From fiscal year 2004 to 2005, “aviation and off-duty ground accidents in the Army have risen more than 17%.” 8. IT’S HER LOBBYING FIRM, TOO Former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman has opened a consulting firm, the Whitman Strategy Group, “whose first client is a chemical company negotiating with the EPA over the cleanup of arsenic-contaminated soil at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y.” The company, FMC Corporation, “is responsible for 136 Superfund sites across the country,” “has been subject to 47 EPA enforcement actions,” and has, over the past seven years, “spent more than $16.5 million on lobbying.” Whitman hasn’t worked directly with FMC, but said she would probably help them “improve their image” and gain “access to the people they need to speak to.” Eileen McGinnis, formerly “Whitman’s chief of staff at the EPA,” is “the only partner at Whitman’s firm who has worked with FMC” to date. McGinnis called FMC “a good corporate citizen.” 9. POP MUSIC PROPAGANDA While U.S. propaganda for foreign audiences is nothing new, questions of how to promote U.S. policy and polish the U.S. image persist. Radio Sawa, a U.S. supported radio channel broadcast in the Middle East, combines Arabic and Western pop music with news written by Voice of America staff. “It‚Äôs tough to independently assess Sawa content from afar, but program summaries and interview transcripts from the State Department help,” the Columbia Journalism Review’s Corey Pein writes. “Sometimes, the questions asked by Sawa correspondents are more revealing than the answers: * “Can you please state what is our stated policy towards the fence that the Israelis are building right now? * “What is the U.S. going to do, in order to swipe away this illusion and this fear of the Arabs and the Iraqis of something called the ‘U.S. occupation,’ which is not really what the U.S. is doing in Iraq? “Iraqis accustomed to road checkpoints and house-by-house raids may not easily be convinced that they are living through an ‘illusion’ of occupation. And whatever ‘our’ policy is, ‘fence’ is a loaded term for the concrete wall snaking through Israel and Palestine,” Pein writes. 10. KFC TRIES SILENCING MORE THAN THE CHICKENS Two members of the animal welfare committee of Yum Brands Inc, KFC’s parent company, resigned after being asked to sign a confidentiality agreement which would have required them to refer all media inquiries to KFC’s corporate headquarters. Over the last three years Dr. Temple Grandin of Colorado State University and Dr. Ian Duncan of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, have advised KFC on improving animal welfare standards. Both objected to the proposed agreement as amounting to censorship. “I feel very strongly that I can talk freely to the press about how the program’s working, what’s been going on with the program,” Grandin told Reuters. Duncan said that his reading of the agreement was that “If someone phoned me up and said ‘You are on the KFC animal welfare committee,’ I was bound to say ‘No comment’.” 11. ONE SMALL STEP TOWARDS FULL DISCLOSURE For one year, U.S. government agencies will be banned “from issuing video news releases that do not clearly identify” the government as the source of the footage. Congressional members “agreed to include the measure in an emergency spending bill,” which is why the restriction expires after one year. The Truth in Broadcasting Act, scheduled for a Senate Commerce committee hearing on May 12, would make the ban permanent. The Center for Media and Democracy and the media reform group Free Press urged lawmakers not only to pass permanent restrictions, but also to ban the covert airing of both government- and corporate-funded “fake news.” 12. PR FIRMS DON’T GROW ON TREES The U.S. Forest Service “is weighing replacement of 100 of its public information staff with private public relations firms,” according to documents obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The move is in response to “pressure from the Bush White House to put more federal jobs out to bid by private contractors in order to ‘increase the cost-effectiveness of Forest Service work.’” By June 30, the agency will review 100 of its 700 public affairs, communications and graphics positions, to determine whether they should be outsourced. PEER’s Jeff Ruch warned, “Civil servants are under a legal obligation to tell the public the truth while PR firms specialize in shading it.” Last year, the Forest Service’s PR contract with OneWorld Communications was criticized for, among other things, brochures deemed “very misleading” by environmental groups that promoted increased logging in the Sierra Nevada. 13. LET THE LOBBYISTS SOAR Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is opening a lobbying firm, the Ashcroft Group, to provide “strategic consulting, security and internal investigative services, and crisis counseling” to countries, corporations, and industry and political associations. According to a spokesperson, the new firm expects “to grow rapidly.” Ashcroft Group staff include David Ayres, formerly Ashcroft’s chief of staff, and Juleanna Glover Weiss, a lobbyist at the Clark & Weinstock firm, where she “helped the Iraqi Governing Council’s U.S. rep on ‘messaging’,” according to O’Dwyer’s PR Daily. Previously, Glover Weiss was Vice-President Dick Cheney’s press secretary. The Center for Responsive Politics’ Larry Noble said Ashcroft is “clearly trading off the whole anti-terrorism and 9/11 aspect of his being attorney general. … I think he’ll probably find it very profitable.” ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Weekly Spin is compiled by staff and volunteers at the Daily updates and news from past weeks can be found at the Archives of our quarterly publication, PR Watch, are at: CMD also sponsors SourceWatch, a collaborative research PR Watch, Spin of the Day, the Weekly Spin and SourceWatch Contributions to the Center for Media and Democracy CMD 520 University Ave. #227 Madison, WI 53703 To donate now online, visit: |
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