"To cut through the barriers of hateful propaganda, the Voice of America and other broadcast services are expanding their programs in Arabic and Persian -- and, soon a new television service will begin providing reliable news and information across the region," George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address. In response, the Toronto Star's editorial page editor emeritus Haroon Siddiqui writes, "There's the Bush doctrine: The mess in the Middle East is to be solved by duplicating regional propaganda with American propaganda." The U.S.-funded Iraqi Media Network, which is run by a defense contractor, has drawn much criticism from Iraqis and former employees for being a mouth piece of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The Boston Globe reports that Bush is asking for $80 million this year for the National Endowment for Democracy, up from $39.6 million. The new money is slated to fund groups in the Middle East that support free elections, open markets, a free press, and labor and trade unions. NED, however, has critics on both the right and the left. Terry Allen, from the Chicago-based In These Times, wrote in commentary accompanying a listing of Project Censored's under-reported stories of 2003 that "using the same conduit Reagan used to fund the contras, the National Endowment for Democracy, the George W. Bush administration had funneled money to Venezuelan Opposition.

"The United States spent $75.1 billion last year on medical expenses, such as drugs, doctor visits and hospitalizations, related to obesity, according to a study published this month in the journal Obesity Research," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The study, financed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that taxpayers paid half of the bill through Medicare and Medicaid programs. Obesity-related health problems added up to 5.7 percent of the nation's total medical expenses, according to the report. America's expanding waistline has meant more fast food and soft drink dollars being spent on PR. "New York-area McDonald's have kicked off a PR campaign designed to increase sales by telling customers how various McDonald's offering cans fit into their favorite diets," PR Week reports. The industry front group Center for Consumer Freedom, which got $200,000 from Coca-Cola in 2001, wrote in an newspaper op-ed that opposition to soda machines in schools is "fueled by junk science and media frenzy" and that it is a "wild claim that soda consumption causes childhood obesity."