As the anti-fast food documentary "Super Size Me" hits theaters, McDonald's is fighting back. "We're responding aggressively because the film is a gross misrepresentation," said a company spokesperson. Helping defend McDonald's are "global nutritionist" Cathy Kapica and the corporate-funded American Council on Science and Health. According to PR Week, ACSH's "aggressive independent third-party response" includes editorials on Tech Central Station, a website published by Republican lobbyists. Also under attack is Coca-Cola, for alleged "complicity in gross human rights violations" in Colombia, reports O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "We plan to destroy the image of Coca-Cola, for which it has spent millions to cultivate," said the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke's director. To "get the facts to all concerned parties," the soft drink giant launched www.cokefacts.org and www.killercoke.com -- the latter to "capture" people seeking the Campaign's website, www.killercoke.org.

The Associated Press and the Mississippi paper Hattiesburg American filed a lawsuit "against the U.S. Marshals Service over an incident in April in which a federal marshal erased reporters' recordings of a speech Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave to high school students" about the U.S. Constitution. The lawsuit alleges the marshal "violated due process and the constitutional protections from unreasonable search and seizure." Saying "the government's power is overwhelming," Associated Press President Tom Curley announced plans to form a "media advocacy center to lobby in Washington for open government." Curley said the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists and others would be invited to help "seek better statutory guarantees for more accessible government information."

Jackie Calmes writes: "Over the past four years, Mr. Bush has swung from free-market candidate to sometime-protectionist president and back again." But lately, on the campaign trail, "he has re-emerged as a full-throated free trader," even in "the most hotly contested states... with the biggest job losses." Why? "Advisers have made optimism a hallmark of the re-election campaign and argue that an upbeat message trumps pessimism every time, even on trade and even in hard-hit Midwestern manufacturing states." According to The Hill, 37 House Republicans urged Commerce Secretary Don Evans "to continue highlighting the many benefits of foreign-based companies choosing to 'insource' work here in America." Industry groups (including the Coalition for Employment through Exports) "are leading an informal group formed to fend off outsourcing-related measures" like Independent Bernie Sanders' Defending American Jobs Act.

In its damning report, the Red Cross states that "physical and psychological coercion were used by [U.S.] military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation" from Iraqi detainees. But look on the bright side: "American companies that sell globally say that they have so far experienced little if any disruption from discontent over the war in Iraq," reports The New York Times. "In a display of the growing sophistication in marketing... many people see products originating from the United States as firmly rooted in their own home nations." But "one of the world's largest market research organizations" found the opposite in their annual 30-country survey: "Diminishing respect for American culture is having a detrimental impact on American brands around the world."