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THIS WEEK'S NEWS

1. Disinfopedia versus Swift Boat Vets and Other Front Groups
2. Secret Justice
3. SLICK – The Novel
4. Secondhand Smoke Screen
5. Bush Campaign Grabs For Iraqi Gold
6. Full Court Press Release
7. Got the Big Stick; Need to Learn to Speak Softly
8. Vietnam, Re-revisited
9. Media “Bigfeet” Stumble
10. For Whom the Firm Polls
11. Perks for Peaceful Protesters
12. Growing Market Opposition to GMO Referenda
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1. DISINFOPEDIA VERSUS SWIFT BOAT VETS AND OTHER FRONT GROUPS
www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=swift+boat&btnG=Google+Search
Last year we launched the Disinfopedia, a “wiki” website designed to mobilize hundreds of volunteers to help us investigate and expose front groups and propaganda campaigns. The Disinfopedia is an experiment in participatory investigative journalism, and the experiment seems to be succeeding. One recent example is the Disinfopedia listing for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Not only is the Disinfopeda entry on the group extensive, up to date and well documented, it's being widely read by thousands daily and it appears at or near the top in Google. There will always be propaganda and deception, but Disinfopedia is proving a powerful tool for getting to the truth. We invite you to help us to research, edit and write the Disinfopedia; click here to learn how to get started.
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1093406400
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1093406400

2. SECRET JUSTICE
www.abc.net.au/am/content/2004/s1183557.htm
After nearly three years of confinement at Guantanamo Bay, Australian national David Hicks goes on trial for alleged terrorism before a U.S. military court. “There'll be no pictures allowed of David Hicks, no audio from the courtroom, no pictures of the defence, prosecution or presiding officer entering the building, and military camera operators will choose what images are broadcast via closed circuit television to most journalists covering the hearing,” reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. According to reporter Leigh Sales, some of the restrictions on press coverage “are bizarre and have no parallel. For example, journalists in the courtroom can't use phone lines to file stories during breaks in the proceedings. If you get up to go to the toilet, you are then barred from the courtroom for the rest of the day. … Another restriction here, is that no sound or pictures whatsoever will be taken of the military commissions, even though they're one of the most important legal aspects of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, and the first proceedings of this kind since the Second World War.”
SOURCE: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, August 24, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1093320001
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1093320001

3. SLICK – THE NOVEL
www.slicknovel.com/
Check out the new book SLICK by first-time novelist Daniel Price. SLICK's anti-hero protagonist, Scott Singer, works “in the field of perception management, although the less colorful term is 'media manipulation.' We're the CIA of PR, the sublime little gremlins who live just outside your senses, selling you products and concepts without you even knowing. … I've conspired with the gun people, schemed with the liquor people, toiled for tobacco, and moiled for Monsanto. I've pushed polluters and promoted porn. I've shilled for Shell and lied for Tide. I've helped a major pharmaceutical company sell a drug that does nothing by promoting a disease that doesn't exist. And that's just the old stuff on my resume.” Daniel Price is both a brilliant novelist and a sharp media critic who also publishes AbusedByTheNews.com, a website “dedicated to analyzing the tricks, kinks and quirks of America's corporate news media.”
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1093320000
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1093320000

4. SECONDHAND SMOKE SCREEN
www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=220175&site=3
A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine finds that Philip Morris attempted to influence media coverage of secondhand smoke. Citing internal industry documents, the study's author, Dr. Richard Hunt, says the company and its PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, made “a controversy out of secondhand smoke when there wasn't any.” Hurt also said Philip Morris gave “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to training programs at the Herndon, VA-based National Journalism Center. “Hurt said the funds went to support speakers who would discount research on the dangers of secondhand smoke,” PR Week writes. “They also backed an internship program to place reporters who supported the tobacco industry's position, Hurt said.”
SOURCE: PR Week (sub req'd), August 23, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1093233601
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1093233601

5. BUSH CAMPAIGN GRABS FOR IRAQI GOLD
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1288686,00.html
George W. Bush's re-election campaign has been accused of appropriating the Olympics for political means. A recent Bush/Cheney advertisement that links Iraq's and Afghanistan's participation in the Olympic games with the White House's “war on terror” is drawing criticism. “To the embarrassment of their media handlers in Athens, members of the Iraqi football team have reacted furiously to the news that their efforts are being used to aid Mr Bush's efforts to win a second term in the White House,” The Guardian reports. The team's coach, Adnan Hamd, told Sports Illustrated magazine, “My problem is not with the American people. They are with what America has done; destroyed everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?” The Guardian is also reporting that Bush may be “planning to visit Athens later this week to watch some sporting events, including a potential gold-medal winning bid by the Iraqi football team.”
SOURCE: The Guardian (UK), August 23, 2004
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1093233600

6. FULL COURT PRESS RELEASE
www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19616/
“Over the past few weeks of Presidential WrestleMania MMIV, the Bush campaign has fired off more than a dozen press releases about John Kerry's policies on energy, nuclear-waste storage, forest and water protections, and other environmental issues – a hodgepodge of smears, exaggerations, and obfuscations intended to besmirch Kerry's pro-environment reputation,” Grist Magazine's Amanda Griscom writes. Polls indicate that swing-state voters are concerned about things like pollution and wilderness conservation, prompting the Bush campaign to “neutralize” the environment as an election issue. “They know they can't persuade voters that Bush is good on the environment, so they're trying to create enough confusion about Kerry's record that people decide it can't be the issue that decides their vote,” said Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director. “Most of the Bush team's environment-related releases rely on one of two tired claims – that Kerry is a flip-flopper, or that creating jobs and protecting the environment are incompatible goals,” Griscom writes.
SOURCE: Alternet, August 20, 2004
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1092974403

7. GOT THE BIG STICK; NEED TO LEARN TO SPEAK SOFTLY
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17134-2004Aug19.html
Condoleezza Rice admitted, “We are obviously not very well organized for the side of public diplomacy.” The 9/11 Commission warned, “If the United States does not act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world, the extremists will gladly do the job for us.” Former State Department diplomacy head Margaret Tutwiler said, “Public diplomacy need[s] to be seriously prioritized on an equal level with an aircraft carriers.” State Department Cultural Affairs head Patricia Harrison described ongoing efforts: “'good news' stories on reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan [for] American and foreign news,” an Iraq sister-city program, support for the Iraqi National Symphony, and donating “thousands of wheelchairs to Iraq, Morocco, Jordan, Oman and other areas of the Arab world.”
SOURCE: Washington Post, August 20, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1092974402
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1092974402

8. VIETNAM, RE-REVISITED
www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html
John Kerry called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group “a front for the Bush campaign.” The New York Times' in-depth report on the group finds “a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove. … The group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family – one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election. … On close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth prove to be riddled with inconsistencies.”
SOURCE: New York Times, August 20, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1092974401
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1092974401

9. MEDIA “BIGFEET” STUMBLE
seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/187147_joel20.html
“Although we're not yet through the national conventions, 2004 is emerging as a snakebitten election for America's media 'Bigfeet' – our news organizations and TV's non-stop talking heads,” writes Joel Connelly. “They've been wrong so much of the time already.” During the Democratic primaries, the punditocracy erroneously anointed Howard Dean the frontrunner; more recently, they've largely ignored the worsening mess in Iraq while declaring that Iraq is putting Kerry on the defensive. Why are the big media doing such a poor job? Connelly says it's because “they're rich,” “they pursue trivia,” and “they're tempted” by a 24-hour news cycle that is driving journalistic standards out the window.
SOURCE: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 20, 2004
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1092974400

10. FOR WHOM THE FIRM POLLS
www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4433912,00.html
The U.S.-based “strategic market research firm” Penn, Schoen & Berland is under scrutiny in Venezuela. The firm's polling erroneously predicted that President Hugo Chavez lost a recall referendum; the opposition “insists [the poll] shows the results of the vote itself were fraudulent.” Moreover, poll “results … were sent out by fax and e-mail to media outlets and opposition offices more than four hours before polls closed,” in violation of Venezuelan law. The fact that “members of Sumate, a Venezuelan group that helped organize the recall initiative, [did] the fieldwork for the poll,” has also raised questions; Sumate received U.S. National Endowment for Democracy funding “to encourage participation in the referendum.”
SOURCE: Associated Press, August 19, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1092888000
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1092888000

11. PERKS FOR PEACEFUL PROTESTERS
prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=219938&site=3
“In a PR appeasement attempt, NYC & Company, the city's official tourism-marketing organization, has offered incentives to Republican National Convention protestors who will protest peacefully,” writes PR Week. Participating restaurants, museums, hotels and shops called the “Peaceful Political Activists” campaign “a good business decision.” United for Peace and Justice, which is seeking a protest permit for Central Park, called it a publicity stunt. The director of the business consortium Sensible Priorities, who developed the campaign, said, “I'm afraid this Central Park thing is really going to blow up.” Across from the press conference announcing the campaign, “four members of Code Pink, a women's protest group, were arrested for trying to dangle a 40-foot-long banner from their ninth-floor [hotel] window.”
SOURCE: PR Week (reg. req'd), August 18, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1092801600
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1092801600

12. GROWING MARKET OPPOSITION TO GMO REFERENDA
www.sacbee.com/content/business/story/10397422p-11317095c.html
“Worried that county bans on biotech crops could spread throughout the state, mainstream farm groups from the California Cattlemen's Association to the national Farm Bureau are marshaling their resources,” reports the Sacramento Bee. The California Rice Commission is “developing a 'communications plan' to influence Butte [County] voters along with a backup litigation plan in case the [anti-biotech] measure passes.” Following votes to ban biotech crops in California's Mendocino and Trinity counties, “biotech backers are widely rumored to be shopping legislation that would stop counties from regulating biotech crops. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture … reportedly is scouring county initiatives to build a legal case against them.”
SOURCE: Sacramento Bee, August 16, 2004
More web links related to this story are available at: www.prwatch.org/spin/August_2004.html#1092628805
To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1092628805

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