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THIS WEEK’S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. Support Our Props
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Fake News Haikus for You
2. Still Doctoring the Facts
3. Preventing Embarrassing Information Becoming Public
4. President’s Ad Man Nominated To Broadcasting Board of Governors
5. Toxic Sludge, Soda and Beer Are All Good for You!
6. It’s Miller Time
7. A Wish List for Australian Conservatives
8. Good vs. Evil Redux
9. Bread, Circuses and U.S. Aid to Haiti
10. Don’t Tell Us To Do What We’re Already Doing!
11. North Korea’s Ashes of Evil
12. Narrowcasting Video News Releases
13. Outsourcing is Good for You
14. Probe of Armstrong Williams Widens
15. TV Nation Building
16. Vote on VNR Disclosure October 20
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== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. SUPPORT OUR PROPS
by Sheldon Rampton The biggest surprise for me about the furor following President Bush’s recent staged TV event with U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq was the media’s newfound willingness to expose the facade. Bush has been conducting similar staged events for years now, and he rarely gets called on them.
Bush’s teleconference with soldiers outraged Paul Rieckhoff, the Iraq war veteran who organized Operation Truth. Rieckhoff wrote a devastating critique of the event:
For the rest of this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4073
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. FAKE NEWS HAIKUS FOR YOU
https://www.groundspring.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2344-0|1118-0
Thank you to all who responded to last week’s appeal to “turn off the propagandists”! To those who haven’t contributed, you can still support our campaign to stop fake news. Make your tax-deductible donation to the Center for Media and Democracy today, using the secure link above, or mail your check to CMD, 520 University Ave, Suite 227, Madison, WI 53703. The Center is a bit like a haiku, a small poem with only a few syllables that captures everyday truths. The Center, with only a small staff, works to reveal truths everyday. Here’s a “Fake News Haiku”:
“White House pronouncements /
Like spinning maple seedlings /
Which tales will take root?”
You can submit your own Fake News Haiku (first line, 5 syllables; second, 7 syllables; third, 5 syllables) to laura@prwatch.org, or send them along when you make your contribution to the Center. We’ll share more in future Spin emails!
SOURCE: Center for Media and Democracy, October 19, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4088
2. STILL DOCTORING THE FACTS
www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2005/11/paging_dr_ross.html
“When American corporations come up against inconvenient science,” writes Bill Hogan, “they call in the American Council on Science and Health.” The group’s medical / executive director, Dr. Gilbert Ross, has “defended the Wood Preservative Science Council, saying … the arsenic in pressure-treated wood poses ‘no risk to human health,’” and has written “on behalf of the farmed-salmon industry that the PCBs in fish ‘are not a cause of any health risk, including cancer.’” And Ross’ background is as spotty as his junk science-for-hire. For “his participation in a scheme that ultimately defrauded New York’s Medicaid program of approximately $8 million,” Ross had his medical license revoked, spent a year at a federal prison camp, and was barred from the Medicare or Medicaid programs for 10 years, after a judge found him to be “a highly untrustworthy individual.” Ross regained his medical license last year.
SOURCE: Mother Jones magazine, November / December 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4092
3. PREVENTING EMBARRASSING INFORMATION BECOMING PUBLIC
newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=afr&kw=Verona+Burgess&pb=all_ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=today&so=relev
Guidelines issued by the Australian government’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet advise public servants on how to avoid personal notebook comments being disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act. “As some comments included in notebooks may have the potential to cause embarrassment or could be misinterpreted if taken out of context, you should transcribe the information that needs to be recorded into a file note, record of conversation or minute, and ensure it is placed on the appropriate departmental file. You can then destroy the original notes,” the guideline says. In 2002 a Senate Committee of Inquiry investigating fabricated claims against a group of refugees perpetuated by a government taskforce complained that a failure to keep proper records rendered “the activities of the Taskforce largely inaccessible to subsequent scrutiny.”
SOURCE: Australian Financial Review, October 19, 2005 (sub req’d)
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4091
4. PRESIDENT’S AD MAN NOMINATED TO BROADCASTING BOARD OF GOVERNORS
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051017-10.html
George W. Bush nominated his campaign media strategist Mark McKinnon to serve on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees U.S.-funded international media outlets including Radio Sawa, Al Hurra and Voice of America. Half of the top 50 Bush reelection campaign expenditures went to McKinnon’s firm Maverick Media, totaling $170 million. (While the majority of the money went towards campaign ads, the standard commission for media consulting firms is 15 percent, according to Campaigns & Elections.) “I think the most important thing to recognize is that in all the campaigns with President Bush, it always begins with the president saying: ‘Here are the things I care about. These are the things I want to talk about. Now, you guys can go and execute the plan however you want to, but this is what I’m talking about; this is what I believe in,’” McKinnon told Frontline for their 2005 piece on Karl Rove called “The Architect.”
SOURCE: White House, October 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4090
5. TOXIC SLUDGE, SODA AND BEER ARE ALL GOOD FOR YOU!
online.wsj.com/article/SB112933236649169362.html?mod=mm_hs_advertising
After a survey found that only 10 percent of respondents rated PepsiCo as a company that was “concerned with my health,” the soft drink company is launching “a new advertising campaign for its ‘Smart Spot’ products.” Pepsi rates more than 200 of its products as healthier, “Smart Spot” foods, including diet soda and baked potato chips. Pepsi will also launch a pilot project, called “Perfect Storm,” later this year, “in a major U.S. city with a significant population of both African-Americans and Latinos.” It’s targeting “urban youth and ‘ethnic gatekeepers’” because “Smart Spot” marketing doesn’t “always resonate with minorities.” Similarly, Advertising Age reports that Anheuser-Busch is considering a new marketing campaign, that “beer is good for you.” Busch’s Bob Lachky said, “We will work hard to give the platform to independent third-party experts who confirm that moderate drinking of any alcohol can be better than abstinence for most adults.”
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal (sub. req’d.), October 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4089
6. IT’S MILLER TIME
www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/national/16miller.html?pagewanted=1
The New York Times has published three stories about testimony by its reporter, Judith Miller, to a grand jury investigating the question of whether Bush administration officials tried to discredit White House critic Joseph C. Wilson by illegally leaking information to the press about his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. The stories include Miller’s first-person recounting of what she told the grand jury, a chronology of the Miller case, and an analysis suggesting that I. Lewis Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, may still be a focus of the criminal investigation. Miller’s own account of her testimony contains some notable ambiguities, such as her inability to remember how a misspelled mention of Plame’s name wound up in her notebook from an interview with Libby. And in an independent critique, Norman Solomon points out some disturbing details in Miller’s account, such as her admission that she was given “clearance” by the Pentagon “to see secret information” which she “was not permitted to discuss” with her own editors. “There’s nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government,” Solomon states. “But if she’s supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation — and the fact that The New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.”
SOURCE: New York Times, October 16-17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4086
7. A WISH LIST FOR AUSTRALIAN CONSERVATIVES
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16937378%5E7583,00.html
Reviewing the state of Australian conservativism, Jason Briant, a Research Fellow at the corporate funded think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, argues conservatives need to “become better organised”. Briant writes that while the conservative movement is on a roll, there are “too many small, underfunded organisations that are barely capable of communicating with each other, let alone providing a coherent, credible source of advice for potentially sympathetic policy-makers.” Briant believes that there is a need for a “larger, better funded and more professional conservative movement in Australia, possibly loosely modelled along similar lines to the successful movement in the US.” One particular target for conservatives’ attention, he argues, should be universities — “particularly the social science and humanities faculties.”
SOURCE: The Australian, October 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4082
8. GOOD VS. EVIL REDUX
www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_002147.php The New York Times’
David E. Sanger notes a change in how George W. Bush discusses future U.S. military activities. Bush “has begun warning that the insurgency is already metastasizing into a far broader struggle to ‘establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia,’” Sanger writes. TheRevealer.org’s Jeff Sharlet comments, “[T]his is reductive rhetoric that equates the complexities of Indonesia, where ‘radical Islamists’ struggle against a dictatorship-disguised-as-a-democracy – and one directly descended from a genocidal regime just a decade past – and Spain, now a fully democratic country. Not to mention the stretch in between Spain and Indonesia. The question is, Will the media buy it?” Given “the allure of such a powerful dichotomy to a press that has so long peddled stories dependent on ‘us’ and ‘them,’” Sharlet writes, “it’s legitimate to ask, now, what’s driving this latest variation on the age-old ‘battle between good and evil’ story – Bush’s politics, or the demands of the press?”
SOURCE: TheRevealer.org, October 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4084
9. BREAD, CIRCUSES AND U.S. AID TO HAITI
counterpunch.org/kramer10142005.html
The U.S. Agency for International Development’s Haiti Field Report “provides an excellent case study for investigating the role of USAID in promoting U.S. foreign policy objectives under the friendly guise of aid,” writes Sasha Kramer. “The United States is primarily concerned with Haiti’s upcoming elections. … In Haiti, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the timeliness and appearance of legitimacy of the electoral process are of paramount importance for the Bush Administration’s PR machine.” USAID, she writes, has a “strategy for pacifying Haiti’s largest political party, Lavalas, though selective distribution of aid.” For example, USAID established a “Play for Peace” summer camp in the neighborhood of a popular priest and Lavalas activist. According to Kramer, USAID concluded, “The fruits of these efforts were seen during a recent demonstration attended by 200 people. At the same time … 300 people were enjoying the summer camp. It is believed that the camp prevented the demonstration from being larger and giving greater legitimacy to the protesters.”
SOURCE: CounterPunch, October 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4081
10. DON’T TELL US TO DO WHAT WE’RE ALREADY DOING!
www.theage.com.au/news/business/bca-fights-social-responsibility-law/2005/10/16/1129401144710.html
“The Business Council of Australia has come out against Government plans to create legislation forcing directors to meet certain levels of corporate social responsibility (CSR),” reports The Age. “Mandating CSR through legislative intervention runs the risk of stifling the innovation and creative approaches to CSR that are being adopted by Australian companies,” claims the lobby group, in a report to Parliament. The report stresses, “The greatest social contribution made by corporations is through employment, the goods and services they create and the wealth these produce.” It also highlights the existing CSR efforts of Council members. The chair of Morgan Stanley Australia says government mandates would result in less meaningful CSR: “People would invent a bit of jargon, for example ‘societally appropriate value maximisation,’ as a way of asserting that they were doing whatever Canberra thought it was causing them to do.”
SOURCE: The Age (Australia), October 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4080
11. NORTH KOREA’S ASHES OF EVIL
www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,16518,1593914,00.html
“British American Tobacco, the world’s second largest cigarette company, has secretly been operating a factory in North Korea for the past four years,” reports the Guardian, though “BAT has never mentioned the factory in its annual accounts.” When asked about North Korea’s human rights record — Amnesty International has reported on the torture and execution of detainees, and a “basic lack of political freedom” there — a BAT spokesperson said, “It is not for us to interfere with the way governments run countries.” Moreover, she said, BAT could “lead by example” by promoting international business standards and corporate social responsibility. The revelation further complicated British politician Kenneth Clarke’s candidacy to head the Conservative Party. Clarke has worked for BAT since 1998, chairing their corporate social responsibility committee. BAT confirmed that Clarke knew about its North Korean factory, since he reviews “human rights reports on all countries where we operate.”
SOURCE: The Guardian (UK), October 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4079
12. NARROWCASTING VIDEO NEWS RELEASES
www.prweek.com/us/sectors/crisis/article/521853
Public relations firms that produce video news releases (VNRs) aren’t just targeting national news, writes Craig McGuire of PR Week. Increasingly, they’re working to place their videos on local and cable stations as well as websites. “Today VNRs are much more than just broadcast placement tools. They are being targeted to a variety of audiences through web syndication, strategic placements in broadcast, cable, and site-based media in retail outlets and hospitals,” says Tim Bahr, managing director of MultiVu, a leading VNR producer. And some clients are opting for “guaranteed placement,” a relatively new trend in which PR firms and production houses pay media channels outright to carry what they call “branded journalism.”
SOURCE: PR Week, October 17, 2005 (sub. req’d.)
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4078
13. OUTSOURCING IS GOOD FOR YOU
www.manufacturingnews.com/news/05/1012/art1.html
After stonewalling for a year and a half, the U.S. Commerce Department has released a report on the issue of offshore outsourcing of service-sector jobs and high-tech industries. “But the 12-page document represented by the agency as its final report is not what was written by its analysts,” writes Richard McCormack of Manufacturing and Technology News (MTN). “Rather, it was crafted by political appointees at Commerce and at the White House, according to those familiar with it. At an estimated cost of $335,000 — or $28,000 per page — the document MTN received from the Commerce Department’s Technology Administration contains no original research and forsakes its initial intent of providing a balanced view of outsourcing. … According to those who have tracked the report’s whereabouts, it was completed well before the November 2004 presidential election but was delayed for clearance by the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress due to the controversial nature of the subject.”
SOURCE: Manufacturing and Technology News, October 12, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4077
14. PROBE OF ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS WIDENS
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/10/14/national/w110341D05.DTL
“Investigators at the Education Department have contacted the U.S. attorney’s office regarding the Bush administration’s hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams to promote its agenda,” writes Nancy Benac. The Government Accountability Office recently concluded that the Education Department engaged in illegal “covert propaganda” by hiring Williams to promote the administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing that he was being paid. U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) has pressed for a criminal fraud investigation focused on questions about whether Williams actually performed the work cited in his monthly reports to the Education Department. “It’s bad enough the administration bribed a journalist to promote their policies, but now it looks like taxpayer dollars were handed over for work that was never done,” said Lautenberg.
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, October 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4076
15. TV NATION BUILDING
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/10/13/national/w133549D86.DTL
“It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday’s vote on a new Iraqi constitution.” The ten U.S. Army soldiers and one Iraqi soldier speaking from Tikrit were “coached” before Bush spoke to them. The Iraqi, Sergeant Major Akeel, only said, “Thank you very much for everything. I like you.” Reporter Jeremy Scahill observed, “Under Saddam, Iraqis were bombarded via their TVs with video of the Iraqi leader meeting his generals in Tikrit. … For Iraqis, Tikrit represented the mother of all locations for the regime’s propaganda.” Scahill contrasts the soldiers’ glowing reports with “most independent assessments, to which the White House would never dare listen.” After spending a week with “a crack unit of the Iraqi army,” a Knight Ridder reporter wrote, “Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.”
SOURCE: Associated Press, October 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4071
16. VOTE ON VNR DISCLOSURE OCTOBER 20
www.odwyerpr.com/members/1013commerce_vnrs.htm
On October 20, the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee will consider the Truth in Broadcasting Act, “as part of a mark-up session with three other bills.” (The meeting will be webcast, at www.commerce.senate.gov.) The Act would require government-funded video news releases (VNRs) or audio news releases to carry a clear disclaimer, such as a “conspicuous” tag reading, “Produced by the U.S. Government” visible “for the entire duration” of the VNR. PR Week assesses the industry’s reaction to VNR “flaps” and the Armstrong Williams “imbroglio” and finds it to be “spotty” and “inconclusive.” They write, “In April, Ketchum unveiled its first-ever guidelines for disclosure. … Just last month, Edelman unveiled its first-ever code of conduct for employees. … Other agencies,” including Burson-Marsteller and Porter Novelli, “have not officially codified policies regarding disclosure.” See our “No Fake News!” page for actions you can take to demand accountability for propagandists and disclosure of all materials provided to newsrooms by third parties.
SOURCE: O’Dwyer’s PR Daily (sub. req’d.), October 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4070
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