PR Watch, Second Quarter 2003, Volume 10, No. 2

Flack Attack

The modern environmental movement owes much of
its success to grassroots organizing. The first Earth Day in 1970 was
marked by marches, demonstrations and protests manifesting the power
of aggressive, 1960s-style activism.

align="BOTTOM">Organizing from the ground up helped build the popular support that
environmental causes enjoy today. Opinion polls continue to indicate
that the vast majority of people today believe that human actions are
damaging the natural environment they live in.

Fish Out of Water: Behind the Wise Use Movement's Victory in Klamath

by Sheldon Rampton

Coming at the end of the summer of 2002, it was
the worst fishery disaster that anyone had seen in the history of the
Klamath watershed--a massive die-off of an estimated 34,000 chinook,
coho and steelhead salmon on the Klamath River near the California-Oregon
border. In a single blow, more than 30 percent of the entire year's salmon
run was wiped out.

align="BOTTOM">"It's a lot larger than anything I've seen reported on the
TV news or in the newspapers," said Walt Lara of the Yurok Tribal Council,
one of the Native American tribes that fishes in Klamath.

Fools Rush In: The Militia Movement and Klamath Falls

by Sheldon Rampton

Following Timothy McVeigh's 1995 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City, the militia movement seemed to go into decline, with a number of militia groups publicly disbanding. In Klamath Falls, however, the militia movement proved itself still capable of aggressive organizing, swelling local protests by trucking in activists from neighboring states, and using the water conflict as an opportunity to indoctrinate and recruit local farmers to their cause.

As Others See Us: Competing Visions of a Sanitized War

Book excerpt from Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Like all good television, the war in Iraq had a dramatic final act, broadcast during prime time--the sunlight gleaming over the waves as the president's fighter jet, with his name and the words "Commander in Chief" painted below the pilot's window, descended from the sky onto the USS Abraham Lincoln. The plane zoomed in, snagged a cable stretched across the flight deck and screeched to a stop, and Bush bounded out, dressed in a snug-fitting olive-green flight suit with his helmet tucked under his arm. He strode across the flight deck, posing for pictures and shaking hands with the crew of the carrier. He had even helped fly the jet, he told reporters. "Yes, I flew it," he said. "Yeah, of course, I liked it." Surrounded by gleaming military hardware and hundreds of cheering sailors in uniform, and with the words "Mission Accomplished" emblazoned on a huge banner at his back, he delivered a stirring speech in the glow of sunset that declared a "turning of the tide" in the war against terrorism. "We have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world," Bush said. " Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free."