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THIS WEEK’S NEWS
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Lincoln Group Bombards Iraq with Fake News
2. Swiss Freeze Biotech Rollout
3. Democracy, By God
4. That Old Canard Liberal Bias
5. Hyping Online Shopping
6. Camera/Iraq
7. Target Practice for Military Recruiters
8. Not So Tough On Drugs After All
9. Protesters Arrested
10. The Future of PR
11. Goodnight, Nightline
12. Tomlinson’s Other Job
13. The Ghost of Newsrooms Past
14. Bush Threatens to Bomb Media, Blair Gags It
15. That’s Advertainment
16. Where Was the Media Between Invasion and Murtha?
17. Lobbying Europe
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== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. LINCOLN GROUP BOMBARDS IRAQ WITH FAKE NEWS
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-infowar30nov30,0,5638790.story
Fake news is being used in the Iraq propaganda war, reports the Los Angeles Times. “[T]he U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military ‘information operations’ troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers. … The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. … Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as ‘Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism,’ since the effort began this year. The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with … Lincoln Group which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group’s Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.”
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4235
2. SWISS FREEZE BIOTECH ROLLOUT
www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33668/story.htm
Swiss citizens backed a five-year moratorium on commercial release of genetically modified plants and animals, despite opposition from their government and industry groups. Fifty-five percent of the voters backed the moratorium. The ballot initiative followed the collection of 100,000 signatures opposing a 2004 law approving commercial release of genetically engineered crops. “All the farmers’ organisations were behind this proposal, which they see as a chance for Swiss agriculture,” Daniel Ammann, a spokesman for the pro-moratorium coalition, told Reuters. Adrian Bebb, from Friends of the Earth, said the vote showed that “the public doesn’t want to eat genetically modified food.” Two of the companies opposing the moratorium were Swiss-based Syngenta and Nestle.
SOURCE: Reuters, November 28, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4233
3. DEMOCRACY, BY GOD
www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_ID=20366#
The Bush administration recently appointed Paul Bonicelli to be deputy director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where he will oversee programs that promote democracy and good governance internationally. Bonicelli’s last job was dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College, a Christian fundamentalist institution that requires students to sign a 10-part “statement of faith” declaring, among other things, that non-Christians will be condemned to hell, “confined in conscious torment for eternity.” “What’s wrong with this picture is that the USAID programs Bonicelli will run are important weapons in the arsenal of Bush’s new public diplomacy czarina, White House confidante Karen Hughes,” writes William Fisher, who has worked for USAID and the U.S. State Department. “These programs are intended to play a central role in boosting Bush’s efforts to foster democracy and freedom in Iraq and throughout the broader Middle East.”
SOURCE: The Daily Star (Lebanon), November 29, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4232
4. THAT OLD CANARD LIBERAL BIAS
www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6286824.html?display=Feature&referral=SUPP
“We were biased, all right – in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden,” veteran journalist Bill Moyers told Broadcasting & Cable. In an interview with the trade publication, Moyers responds to accusations by the now chastened Kenneth Tomlinson, the controversial former head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting who has close ties to the White House, that he is the “exemplar of liberal PBS bias.” Moyers added, “If reporting on what’s happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted. It is an old canard of right-wing ideologues like Tomlinson to equate tough journalism with liberalism. They hope to distract people from the message by trying to discredit the messenger.”
SOURCE: Broadcasting & Cable, November 28, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4231
5. HYPING ONLINE SHOPPING
www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/nov2005/nf20051129_9946_db016.htm
“Do a Google search on ‘Cyber Monday,’ and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago to describe the jump in online shopping activity following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday,” Business Week Online reports. Cyber Monday is the creation of Shop.org, an online retailers trade association. The group’s November 21 press release pitched Cyber Monday as “quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.” The reality, however, is that the Monday after Thanksgiving is only the “12th-biggest day historically,” according to market researcher comScore Networks. “What’s more, most e-tailers say the season’s top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15,” Business Week Online writes.
SOURCE: Business Week Online, November 29, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4230
6. CAMERA/IRAQ
www.camerairaq.com
The Cinema and Media Studies Department at Carleton College in Minnesota has created a website, CameraIraq.com, which gathers news and commentary about public and personal photographic image practices associated with the “war of images in the Middle East.” Items in their collection include photos of the dead bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, the beheading of Nick Berg, the Bush “Mission Accomplished” photo op, and a variety of real and faked images depicting human rights abuses, atrocities and other staples of wartime propaganda.
SOURCE: CameraIraq.com
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4229
7. TARGET PRACTICE FOR MILITARY RECRUITERS
The Pentagon’s Joint Advertising, Market Research & Studies project has “finely sliced and diced its data enough to determine that the U.S. Army’s prospective recruits come from households likely to listen to Spanish radio,” while “the reading list at the households of U.S. Marine Corps prospects includes Car Craft, Guns and Ammo and Outdoor Life.” Good U.S. Air Force prospects “listen to Nascar on the radio,” while U.S. Navy enthusiasts “expect to get married within the next year.” To “navigate a fragmented media environment,” the Defense Department analyzed military applicants from 2000 to 2004, and identified 18 demographic groups “that provide the highest rate of prospective recruits.” These include “Beltway Boomers,” “Blue Chip Blues,” “Young & Rustic,” and “Multiculti Mosaic,” as defined by Claritas, a “marketing information resources company.” To reach these groups, “direct, interactive and other one-to-one marketing tactics,” including email, are used; the Navy is “exploring emerging media such as cellphones and text messaging.”
SOURCE: Advertising Age, November 28, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4228
8. NOT SO TOUGH ON DRUGS AFTER ALL
bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7527/1225-a?etoc
Professor Andrew Herx-heimer, emeritus fellow at the UK Cochrane Centre, told the British Medical Journal that changes to the British drug industry’s voluntary code of practice were minimal. “This is very competent window dressing but not much has changed at all,” he said. The drug industry’s revised code followed the House of Commons health select committee’s report, The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry, which found numerous flaws in the system of self-regulation. While the new code introduces new restrictions aimed at limiting the extent of drug company hospitality – including luxury accommodation and first class flights – doctors have criticized the limited sanctions for breaches. “The key weakness is that this is regulated by the industry, and so it is written in such a way that it doesn’t seriously inconvenience companies if anything goes wrong,” said Ike Iheanacho, the editor of the Drugs and Therapeutics Bulletin.
SOURCE: British Medical Journal, November 26, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4227
9. PROTESTERS ARRESTED
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/23/AR2005112302185.html
“About a dozen antiwar protesters, including Daniel Ellsberg and the sister of Cindy Sheehan, were arrested Wednesday morning while camping on a roadside near President Bush’s ranch” in Crawford, Texas, reports Rosalind S. Helderman. The activists ran afoul of a new county law that was passed following this summer’s protests to prohibit parking and camping on public lands near Bush’s property. “The ordinance was very plainly meant to prevent people from protesting in front of Bush’s ranch,” said Dave Jensen, a former Marine and a protester who witnessed the arrests. “We feel that’s a First Amendment issue. It’s intentionally designed to curtail freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.”
SOURCE: Washington Post, November 24, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4221
10. THE FUTURE OF PR
www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/archives/2005/11/is_public_relat.html
Public relations mogul Richard Edelman has some thoughts about the future of PR on his weblog. New technologies and consumer habits, he says, are reflected in changing media: Newspaper circulation figures and advertising revenues are dropping, and “every dollar coming out of print advertising revenue for newspapers is replaced by only 33 cents online.” The rise of video-on-demand and digital video recording is enabling more and more TV viewers to skip ads. “For public relations professionals, these profound changes in media are both a challenge and opportunity,” Edelman says. Among his suggestions for PR pros: “Recognize the influence and credibility of blogs” and attach video clips to “press materials to make it easier for bloggers in consumer technology to create v-blogs.” It sounds like video news releases, largely the province until now of traditional television, are preparing to invade the blogosphere.
SOURCE: Edelman.com, November 21, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4220
11. GOODNIGHT, NIGHTLINE
www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/23/koppel/index.html
Ted Koppel, who recently stepped down from Nightline, his long-running TV news show, “was a fine journalist and a decent man,” writes Fred Branfman, “but to stay atop journalism’s establishment, even he had to make a deal with the devil.” Branfman recalls his own experiences with Koppel during the war in Indochina, praising his “charisma, good humor and an unusual mix of professionalism and human decency.” At Nightline, however, he became “a card-carrying member of the journalistic establishment. … And that is the point. The issue isn’t Ted himself but what he symbolizes: the institutional and structural corruption of an American media that has chosen to define ‘news’ primarily as the information it receives from American officials, and which has traded a critical and independent stance for ‘access’ to powerful figures. As long as the TV lead and Page One stories primarily come, directly or indirectly, from government officials, and as long as critics and dissenting information are ignored or relegated to page A18, Ted Koppel will be the best we get.”
SOURCE: Salon.com, November 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4218
12. TOMLINSON’S OTHER JOB
www.current.org/cpb/cpb0521bbg.shtml
Kenneth Tomlinson, the former head of the U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting who recently resigned in the wake of a damning ethics investigation, is facing further harsh scrutiny. “Tomlinson is also under investigation by the State Department Inspector General’s Office for what he’s done as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors,” reports Geneva Collins. “Meanwhile, two other agencies overseen by the BBG are embroiled in controversies both public and private. The fledgling Arab-language TV channel Alhurra is the subject of three separate government investigations (by the State Department, a House International Relations subcommittee and the Government Accountability Office). And journalists at Voice of America are assailing their BBG-appointed boss for trying to tilt news stories more favorably toward the Bush administration.”
SOURCE: Current, November 21, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4217
13. THE GHOST OF NEWSROOMS PAST
www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/stopthe
presses_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001523690
Staffing cuts and declining circulation are hitting leading newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune. “If newspapers take the shortsighted, short-term approach to tighter budgets by whittling away at investigative reporting, others outside the industry – such as blogs and radio – likely will take up the slack, and newspapers’ decline will accelerate,” writes Editor and Publisher editor Steve Outing. Newsrooms “have become the morgues they so closely resemble, filled with ghosts of the departed and those who await the next ax to fall,” writes Kathleen Parker. “But to those in the trenches, cutting staff is exactly the wrong solution, more like a self-inflicted wound trending toward suicide than a remedy. By cutting newsroom staffs, the corporate suits are reducing the likelihood that papers can do what makes them necessary.”
SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, November 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4215
14. BUSH THREATENS TO BOMB MEDIA, BLAIR GAGS IT
www.mirror.co.uk/news/latest/tm_objectid=16406400%
26method=full%26siteid=94762-name_page.html
The British Government has warned media outlets against publishing further details of a leaked memo of an April 16, 2004 meeting at which George W. Bush allegedly told Tony Blair he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar. The Mirror quoted an anonymous source who stated that Bush “made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.” At the time US forces were attacking the Iraqi town of Fallujah. “The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over U.S. claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors,” The Mirror reported. Following the original report, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith warned news outlets that publication of any further details from the memo would be treated as a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
SOURCE: The Mirror (UK), November 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4214
15. THAT’S ADVERTAINMENT
www.startribune.com/stories/459/5742884.html
In Denver, Sacramento, Atlanta and Cleveland, radio stations owned by the Gannett media conglomerate have adopted “advertainment” – a new programming format that consists of “hybrid shows, which mix entertainment with commercial content (in addition to regular commercial breaks).” In Minneapolis, Gannett affiliate KARE plans this spring to “revamp its chatty mid-morning talk show ‘Today,’ and put much of that happy talk up for sale,” writes Deborah Caulfield Rybak. “Advertisers will pay $2,000 to $2,500 for 5-minute segments on the show. … ‘I am aghast,’ said University of Minnesota media ethics professor Jane Kirtley, who at first thought a reporter was kidding about the new format. ‘This is the logical extension of the whole pernicious practice of infomercials. If viewers are accustomed to getting [talk show] programming in a very different way, to suddenly change the rules on them isn’t fair.’”
SOURCE: Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4213
16. WHERE WAS THE MEDIA BETWEEN INVASION AND MURTHA?
www.observer.com/media_newsstory1-2.asp
Technologically, the news media are vastly more advanced than it was during the Vietnam war, but commercial and political factors have “kept the war in Iraq marginal in the American media,” write Rebecca Dana and Lizzy Ratner. A study done during the Vietnam war found that CBS devoted 91 minutes per month to reporting on Vietnam, whereas U.S. networks this year gave Iraq only 55 minutes per month. Other gaps in reporting include the following:
* “Dead troops are invisible. … Over a six-month span, a set of leading United States newspapers and magazines ran ‘almost no pictures’ of Americans killed in action, and they ran only 44 photos of wounded Westerners.”
* “Major newspapers have cut back on the size of their Baghdad bureaus, with some closing them or allowing them to go unstaffed for stretches.”
* “Government regulation has spread over the battlefield, limiting mobility and access. Where Vietnam correspondents could hop a chopper to combat zones at will, Iraq reporters need to sign eight-page sheaves of rules and are pinned to single units.”
* “Corporate security restrictions likewise stifle reporting. At CNN, reporters need clearance from the bureau chief to leave the network compound; similar rules apply at other networks.”
SOURCE: New York Observer, November 28, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4212
17. LOBBYING EUROPE
www.waronwant.org/?lid=11133
Brussels, home to the European Commission, has also become home to “over 15,000 lobbyists (more than one for every European Commission official) but just 10 per cent of these represent environmental and social groups,” according to a recently-released report. “A massive industry of corporate lobbying has grown up in Brussels with overwhelming influence on European trade policy. Yet the relationship between the European Commission and the corporate lobby is almost entirely unregulated, unaccountable and conducted behind closed doors,” says Dave Timms of the UK-based World Development Movement, one of the groups that produced the report.
SOURCE: WarOnWant.org
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
www.prwatch.org/node/4211
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