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THIS WEEK’S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. CMD & Free Press File ‘Fake News’ Complaint with FCC on Behalf of 40,000 Petition Signers
2. Stauber Debates Fake News on WBUR’s “On Point”
3. PR Execs Undeterred by Fake News “Flap”
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. California Unions Sue to Terminate Video News Releases
2. Rupert Murdoch’s Tax Two-Step
3. Nuclear Energy Is the New Black
4. For Ethnic Press, Access Is Separate, Unequal
5. The Age of Missing Information
6. Enron: Patron Saint of Bush’s Fake News
7. Sacramento to Hollywood: Back Off
8. Mad Cow: Trade War of Words
9. On Iraq, Not All News Deemed “Fit to Print”
10. Americans Still Believe Bush’s War Propaganda
11. Is that Business I Hear Booming?
12. Consumers Buy the Darndest Things
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== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. CMD & FREE PRESS FILE ‘FAKE NEWS’ COMPLAINT WITH FCC ON BEHALF OF 40,000 PETITION SIGNERS
by John Stauber The Center for Media and Democracy and Free Press have filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission urging an investigation of the extensive airing of “fake news” by TV broadcasters who take government and corporate Video News Release (VNR) stories and run them unlabeled as real journalism. In just one week nearly 40,000 citizens have signed our petition calling on the FCC, Congress and local broadcasters to stop fake news.
For the rest of this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3414
2. STAUBER DEBATES FAKE NEWS ON WBUR’S “ON POINT”
by John Stauber I was a guest tonight on WBUR’s nationwide call-in public radio program “On Point.” You can hear the show online at the WBUR website. The topic was the Bush administration’s quarter-billion dollar expenditure on PR and propaganda.
For the rest of this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3375
3. PR EXECS UNDETERRED BY FAKE NEWS “FLAP”
by John Stauber This afternoon I listened in on a conference call among some of the top PR execs in the business of producing video news releases (VNRs), more honestly called fake news. I can report they are proud and confident that the recent “flap” on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times about the Bush administration’s use of fake news will amount to nothing at all. These PR executives are elated that the New York Times piece was about government propaganda, and not about their much more widespread and lucrative production of corporate VNRs, the biggest and richest part of the fake news business.
For the rest of this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3374
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. CALIFORNIA UNIONS SUE TO TERMINATE VIDEO NEWS RELEASES
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/22/BAGIIBSQL21.DTL
A lawsuit filed in Sacramento Superior Court by three California unions seeks a ruling banning public funds from being used for the production of video news releases. VNRs produced by the Schwarzenegger administration have backed moves to remove workers’ lunch break guarantees and opposed legislated nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. A California Health and Human Services Agency spokeswoman defended the use of VNRs. “There is no statutory prohibition against the use of public funds to produce video news releases. … No court has expressly disapproved the expenditure of public funds for VNRs,” she said.
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, March 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3472
2. RUPERT MURDOCH’S TAX TWO-STEP
afr.com/premium/articles/2005/03/22/1111254025160.html
Australian journalist Neil Chenoweth has revealed that Rupert Murdoch “sidestepped stamp duty of $A53 million [U.S.$41.3m] and capital gains tax of up to $A1.2 billion [U.S.$936m] by moving control of his ultimate family company, Kayarem, to the Caribbean and listing it on the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSE) a week before News Corporation was reincorporated in the United States last November. Documents filed with the BSE show that listing Kayarem in the tax haven allowed the Murdoch family to obtain a tax benefit when it sold its controlling interest in the Queensland Press group to News Corp.” In 2001, Chenoweth’s book Virtual Murdoch was published in the UK and as Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard in the U.S. in November 2002.
SOURCE: Australian Financial Review, March 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3471
3. NUCLEAR ENERGY IS THE NEW BLACK
www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30032/story.htm At a conference on the future of nuclear power, International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei “pointed to nuclear energy policy plans in China, Finland, the United States and possibly Poland as proof that nuclear power may be returning to vogue.” U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said, “America hasn’t ordered a new nuclear power plant since the 1970s and it’s time to start building again.” Recently released “internal Energy Department email messages” suggest that some work done “in preparation for seeking a license to open a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada” was falsified. A department spokesperson said the discovery was a positive sign of “quality-assurance procedures.” Our next issue of PR Watch focuses on the nuclear industry – if you’re not already subscribed, sign up today!
SOURCE: Reuters, March 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3415
4. FOR ETHNIC PRESS, ACCESS IS SEPARATE, UNEQUAL
www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846210 Government agencies “often don’t return phone calls or provide relevant information” to the ethnic press, according to a survey by the Independent Press Association-New York. The association is a network of 115 “immigrant, African-American, and community newspapers.” The most unhelpful federal agencies were the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Affairs, and the Department of Labor. Unhelpful New York City agencies included the police, fire department, mayor’s office and Department of Education. The survey found that “timely delivery of information from government agencies” to ethnic media reporters occurs just half of the time.
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3413
5. THE AGE OF MISSING INFORMATION
www.slate.com/id/2114963/ Since President Bush entered office, there has been a 75% increase in the amount of government information classified as secret each year. “Yet an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official databases,” writes Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Once freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred to the public as ‘sensitive but unclassified’ or ‘for official use only.’” Examples of unclassified but unavailable information include the Defense Department’s telephone directory, the National Archives’ historical records, satellite orbital information, aeronautical maps, and environmental data.
SOURCE: Slate, March 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3412
6. ENRON: PATRON SAINT OF BUSH’S FAKE NEWS
www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/arts/20Rich.html Former [[sw:Enron]] CEO [[sw:Ken Lay]], “the poster boy for how big guys can rip off suckers in the stock market,” is back in the news as his trial date nears. According to Frank Rich, “The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery – and yet it thrived, unquestioned, for years.” How? “Enron ‘was fixated on its public relations campaigns.’ It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many).” Rich also writes about Susan Molinari, who “is invariably described as ‘a former Republican Congresswoman’ or a CNBC political analyst’” on news shows. But her current jobs are “C.E.O. of the Washington Group, Ketchum’s lobbying firm, and president of Ketchum Public Affairs” – the same Ketchum responsible for Armstrong Williams and video news releases narrated by faux reporter Karen Ryan.
SOURCE: New York Times, March 20, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3411
7. SACRAMENTO TO HOLLYWOOD: BACK OFF
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/03/18/state/n160412S35.DTL “We believe a court would find the ‘style, tenor and timing’ of the (video news release) to be ‘promotional’ in nature, thus triggering the requirement it be expressly authorized by statute,” ruled the California state legislature’s counsel, on a Schwarzenegger administration VNR. The undersecretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which produced the VNR to support changes in workers’ break guarantees, earlier said that “the administration’s lawyers concluded the videos were permissible.” The Schwarzenegger administration made at least four VNRs without legislative authorization. In national news, the Federal Communications Commission has been asked by Senators John Kerry and Daniel Inouye (both Democrats) to investigate the broadcasting of government-funded VNRs.
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3409
8. MAD COW: TRADE WAR OF WORDS
www.odwyerpr.com/members/0317fh_canada_beef.htm Ongoing litigation to keep the U.S. border closed to Canadian beef and cattle, following three cases of mad cow disease there, has prompted renewed PR efforts. The Alberta Beef Producers hired Fleishman-Hillard, to help “reopen the U.S. market to Canadian beef.” The Montana-based group R-CALF, which filed the lawsuit, “purchased a half-page advertisement in the Washington Post … thanking the U.S. Senate for passing a resolution blocking the resumption of live cattle and full beef trade with Canada.” And the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food Ministry is helping “launch an aggressive marketing campaign to reclaim and expand markets for Canadian beef,” part of the country’s “Repositioning the Livestock Industry Strategy,” launched last year.
SOURCE: O’Dwyer’s PR Daily (reg. req’d.), March 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3398
9. ON IRAQ, NOT ALL NEWS DEEMED “FIT TO PRINT”
www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846234 “Many media outlets self-censored their reporting on Iraq,” often out of fear of offending their audience, found a survey of more than 200 U.S. media personnel by American University’s School of Communications. The “editing that went into content after it was gathered but before it was published” was significant. 15% of those reporting from Iraq said “they did not believe the final version” of their pieces, post-editing, “accurately represented the story.” 20% of those reporting on Iraq from the U.S. “said material was edited for reasons other than basic style and length.” One survey respondent wrote, “The real damage of war on the civilian population was uniformly omitted.” In contrast, 92% said they had “no limits at all” on “the type of interviews conducted.”
SOURCE: Editor & Publisher, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3377
10. AMERICANS STILL BELIEVE BUSH’S WAR PROPAGANDA
abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/story?id=582744 This weekend is the second anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq. The latest ABC News and Washington Post poll of public opinion shows that most Americans still believe, incorrectly of course, that Saddam’s Iraq supported the 9/11 terrorists and had weapons of mass destruction. Interestingly, the poll’s own analysis tries to downplay the significance of its findings, saying, “Most Americans favored overthrowing Saddam years earlier, long before al Qaeda became broadly known.” Oh really? As we document in Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, the war could never have been sold to the American people had ABC, the Washington Post, and the rest of the mainstream media done their job of exposing the false claims of the Bush administration. Instead, they echoed those claims and censored and ignored critics of the war.
SOURCE: ABC News, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3376
11. IS THAT BUSINESS I HEAR BOOMING?
www.odwyerpr.com/members/0316iraqex.htm Iraqex, the U.S.-owned “investment group set up to pursue business in Iraq,” has changed its name to Lincoln Group, after its holding company, Lincoln Alliance Corporation. Lincoln Group has a $6 million, 3-year PR contract for the U.S.-led Multi-National Corps-Iraq, for which it “develops video, audio and print products to support MNC-I initiatives.” It also publishes Iraq Business Journal, a “monthly publication on contract opportunities, life in Iraq and classifieds.” The publication recently interviewed Grand Ayatolla Ali Al-Sistani, who said foreign investment is acceptable, as long as the investor is not with the “occupation forces” or taking “advantage of any instability.” Lincoln Group is still looking for interns.
SOURCE: O’Dwyer’s PR Daily (reg. req’d.), March 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3373
12. CONSUMERS BUY THE DARNDEST THINGS
thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Business/031605.html Afraid that their vote to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration might make Congress more likely to increase fuel efficiency standards, the automobile industry is “trying to polish its image.” The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is claiming, in newspaper and radio ads, and on cleaning sponges given to Congressional staffers, that “cars are 99% cleaner than they used to be.” (The Union of Concerned Scientists calls the Auto Alliance campaign “highly misleading.”) An Auto Alliance spokesperson said increased fuel standards would be “very difficult to achieve,” because of the popularity of large vehicles. “It’s not what we manufacture; it’s what consumers buy,” she said.
SOURCE: The Hill, March 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/3372
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