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"Big Shopping Malls" and "No Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza"

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:36:29 -0700

PR Watch - By Steve Horn - Jul. 28 (Advocacy) - Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel hasbara-extraordinaire, Felix Frankfurter, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Alan Dershowitz, are both on the record as saying that "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza." They are not outliers in holding that opinion. Indeed, former neo-conservative Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the current Foreign Minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, as well as Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev, are all on the record sharing these sentiments. The sentiments, though, fly in the face of the reality that is the daily peril taking place in the Gaza Strip. Indeed, they are but a pipe dream.

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"Media Feeds Americans Fake News About Afghanistan"

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Congresspedia - By Anne Landman - Apr. 05 (News Report) - Glen Greenwald of Salon.com reports that Americans are being fed false and misleading "news" about the U.S. war in Afghanistan because major American media outlets, like the New York Times and CNN, publish propagandized Pentagon accounts of the violence and killing occurring there, without questioning the information they are fed.

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Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

PR Watch - By Diane Farsetta, Sheldon Rampton - May. 11 (News Analysis) - The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week's expose' by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress."

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Fighting Junk Mail via 'Do Not Mail' Lists: Devilish Details and Front Groups

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

PR Watch - By Ann Landman - May. 08 (Special Report) - "For beleaguered consumers, a "Do Not Mail" list certainly sounds attractive: just sign up and junk mail would magically stop....."

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A Bad Week for Corporate Spies - Center for Media and Democracy

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

PR Watch - By Diane Farsetta - Apr. 16 (Special Report) - Over the past week, reporters and activists outed three different corporate spying operations. As John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote in their 1995 book "Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!": "Movements for social and political reform have often become targets of surveillance. ... The public relations industry has developed a lucrative side business scrutinizing the thoughts and actions of citizen activists, using paid spies who are often recruited from government, military or private security backgrounds."

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Jousting with the Lancet: More Data, More Debate over Iraqi Deaths

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

PR Watch - By Diane Farsetta - Feb. 27 (News Analysis) - Theoretically, the public health surveys and polls that have been conducted in Iraq -- at great risk to the people involved -- should help inform and further the debate. But the data is complicated by different research approaches and their attendant caveats. The matter has been further confused by anemic reporting, with news articles usually framed as a "he said / she said" story, instead of an exploration and interpretation of research findings.

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This Week in Congress (Feb. 9 - 15, 2008)

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

PR Watch - By Conor Kenny - Feb. 12 (News Analysis) - (Congresspedia Preview) With the Senate approving an economic package last week, it looks like Congress can now return to some issues that were put on hold while the stimulus plan was crafted...the farm bill...FISA...[and] the president's proposed FY 2009 federal budget..., which expanded military spending at the expense of domestic programs. ...the administration has a likely ally in House ...John Murtha (D-Pa.)...[who] will probably champion defense spending above and beyond that proposed by the administration. Specifically, Murtha will call for the construction of more cargo planes and Navy ships. Here are the committee hearings scheduled for this week in Congress...:

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This Week in Congress (Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2008)

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

PR Watch - By Conor Kenny - Feb. 03 (Review) - This week, we saw Democrats in the Senate becoming more assertive in their second year as the majority party, as the chamber continued its fracas over electronic intelligence reform and prepared to vote on its own economic stimulus package. The House on Tuesday passed its version of an economic stimulus bill. Backed by President Bush, the legislation includes tax incentives for business investment and rebate checks for working Americans. However, also on Tuesday, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), rained on the stimulus parade, signaling his committee would vote on an expanded economic package.

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The Failure of Oregon's Cigarette Tax: a Postmortem

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:40:36 -0800

PR Watch - By Anne Landman - Nov. 12 (Editorial) - The November 6, 2007 election brought a stinging defeat to Oregon's cigarette tax increase. The proposal aimed to raise the state's cigarette tax by 84.5 cents a pack to pay for health insurance for about 100,000 additional poor Oregon children who currently have no coverage. Measure 50, as the tax was called, went down by a wide 60-40% margin.

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Women in Government, Merck's Trojan Horse: Part Three in the Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer series

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:47:16 -0700

PR Watch - By Judith Siers-Poisson - Jul. 10 (Special Report) - In this article, we'll analyze the push for mandated HPV vaccination of adolescent girls that is taking place at the state level throughout the U.S., and the non-profit organization, Women in Government (WIG). WIG has been Merck's non-profit front and direct channel to state-level legislators who are the key to enacting mandates.

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Research, Develop, and Sell, Sell, Sell: Part Two in the Politicsw and PR of Cervical Cancer series

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:43:19 -0700

PR Watch - By Judith Siers-Poisson - Jun. 30 (Special Report) - This series of articles is not primarily about the efficacy of Merck's vaccine, Gardasil, or of GlaxoSmithKline's competing vaccine, Cervarix, which has not yet received FDA approval. Dr. Diane Harper, who has studied HPV for twenty years and worked on the drug trials for both vaccines, told me emphatically that "The vaccines are good and will indeed prevent cervical cancer." But Dr. Harper has serious concerns about Merck's marketing juggernaut, and the push for vaccine mandates for middle-school aged girls.

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Setting the Stage: Part One in a Series on the Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:32:13 -0700

PR Watch - By Judith Siers-Poisson - Jun. 26 (Special Report) - HPV is rampant throughout the world, and the U.S. is no exception. In nearly every state in the U.S. there is a legislative push to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for middle school aged girls, with catch-up clauses to cover girls that have passed that age but are not yet sexually active. I became concerned by the headlong rush to not only approve the vaccine, but to mandate it for middle-school aged girls. Decisions affecting millions of young women should not be made lightly, and certainly not without examining the marketing, PR, and profit motives of a corporation like Merck.

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Has the Internet Changed the Propaganda Model?

Tue, 22 May 2007 13:25:27 -0700

PR Watch - By Sheldon Rampton - May. 22 (Opinion) - In their groundbreaking 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, professors Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky not only explained, but documented with extensive case studies, how mass media and public opinion are shaped in a democracy. Twenty years later, can their "propaganda model" still be used to explain modern media distortions? That was one of the main questions discussed last week at a conference in Windsor, Ontario titled "20 Years of Propaganda?" Organized by Dr. Paul Boin, the conference drew hundreds of scholars and activists including myself, and more than 1,000 people attended a closing speech by Chomsky on May 17. The "propaganda model" that Herman and Chomsky put forward in Manufacturing Consent has made the book notable (some would say notorious) as the most influential book by serious academics to challenge the common dogma of media objectivity in the United States. When it first appeared, it was almost unheard-of to suggest that U.S. media such as the New York Times, Time and Newsweek magazines and CBS News were propaganda vehicles. Today things are somewhat different. Across the political spectrum, there is a widespread belief that disinformation, deception and propaganda pervade the media. On the internet, the initials MSM have become a standard term of disparagement for untrustworthy "mainstream media." The right has in fact far surpassed the left at denouncing the myth of media objectivity and has developed an entire industry of think tanks, media watchdogs and pundits such as Michelle Malkin or Anne Coulter who devote themselves to discovering and denouncing purported instances of media bias -- while enjoying privileged media access themselves. Based on my own experiences -- as a Central American solidarity and antiwar activist during the 1980s, as the co-author of two books about Iraq titled Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever, and as someone who studies the public relations industry and propaganda in general at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) -- I see no shortage of evidence showing that propaganda is very much alive and well as a force shaping public opinion and public policy.

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At Least 11 Members of Congress Now Under Investigation

Thu, 03 May 2007 18:55:06 -0700

PR Watch - By Elliott Fullmer - May. 03 (Review) - By our count, eleven members of Congress (and ten former members who departed with the 109th Congress) are currently the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. Over the past few weeks, new details have emerged in several of these cases. Here's a quick rundown of the latest info (with the appropriate background):

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