Corporate front groups can cause a “boomerang effect" to their sponsors, damaging the reputations of companies like ExxonMobil, Merck, and PepsiCo, when the sponsor's role in misrepresenting issues is widely revealed. Moreover, advance information or instruction can inoculate the public against deception, according to a new study published in the February 2007 issue of Communications Research.

CMD has exposed corporate and PR front groups for years—see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton’s six books, not to mention Spin of the Day and SourceWatch. Now, and evidently for the first time, scholars have undertaken an experiment to show how people respond to and resent corporate manipulation.

When PR Watch most recently caught a cell phone signal from Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and the new Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food, Schlosser was rushing from car to car in New York City, after London, which was just after Berkeley, where he was giving students a preview of the indie film version of "Fast Food Nation." We didn’t have the chance to ask him when he had time to eat. But we did use the time to speak with him about fast food, the U.S. childhood obesity epidemic, and the public relations industry’s techniques in attacking his work. Schlosser has been likened to a latter day Upton Sinclair—exposing the abattoirs and abuses in the meatpacking and calorie-packing processed food industry. If you haven’t read his books, you should, and here are a few reasons why you can’t just see the movie.

Ah, the sounds of School Year 2006-2007: the clatter of coins going down the pop machines to let loose a POWERade or an aspartame-sweetened diet soda--maybe even a bottle of juice or milk. The rip of a new box of "reduced-sugar" Fruit Loops (or Frosted Flakes or Apple Jacks) at breakfast.

PR firms got in the door ahead of most school bells. As a result, parents are especially likely to see signs of the American Beverage Association's (ABA) and Kellogg's promotional efforts to brand their children's eating and drinking habits this year.

I first met Sister Ruth Rosenbaum at the University of Wisconsin’s Living Wage Symposium in 1999. Her Hartford-based Center for Reflection, Education and Action (CREA), established in 1995, had produced impressive reports on miserable wages and working conditions in Haiti and Mexico, and I soon assigned them to students in my course on global sweatshops.

The studies were technical but, like the organization's title, reflective. By CREA's own telling, that credo of "reflection" -- contemplation before collaboration -- helped produce an answer to corporate claims that a "living wage" could be defined as enough earnings to enable a worker to stay alive. This PhD Roman Catholic nun's answer: go forth, meet the workers, know how they live and how much they need to earn to lead sustainable lives. Since its founding, CREA has led or cosponsored shareholder initiatives demanding justice for workers in national and international campaigns, from Taco Bell to Wal-Mart.