"A huge door is closing within our government," warns Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. Aftergood is referring to new efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to keep sensitive - but unclassified - information out of the public domain. According to a department directive, "employees and contractors can be searched at any place or any time to ensure they are in compliance with the policy. They can also face administrative, civil or criminal penalties if they violate the rules." Susan Stranahan warns that "the cloak of secrecy is spreading rapidly under the guise of enhancing national security. ... But the secrets guarded by those in Washington don't only involve Star Wars programs run amok, or abuses of civil rights in a time of war, or poor management of an agency vital to national security. Denial of access to information of all sorts is growing 'at an epidemic rate,' according to Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley."

The 2004 presidential race was the most expensive in history. While Republicans did outspend Democrats -- $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion -- the difference wasn't that much. "Despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush," the Washington Post's Thomas Edsall and James Grimaldi report. "In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision. Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit."

BuzzMetrics, a New York-based specialist in word-of-mouth marketing, is among the companies working to tame the internet by going after "determined detractors," which the New York Times defines as "persistent critics of a company or product that mount their own public relations offensive, often online." According to Paul Rand, managing director at Ketchum Midwest in Chicago, "One determined detractor can do as much damage as 100,000 positive mentions can do good." Detractors, he said, can become "reputation terrorists" who have a personal interest in publicly criticizing a company. "These are the folks we have to track and stay on top of," he said. "To not do so can cost money."

"It's mind-boggling: Marsha Martin, the executive director of AIDS Action - the AIDS community's largest, most visible, and wealthiest Washington lobby, with a multi-million dollar budget - has jumped into bed with the Bush-Rove Republicans with both feet," political journalist Doug Ireland writes on his blog Direland. "In a perfectly scandalous act of betrayal of the AIDS community, Martin is one of a small committee sponsoring a pricey celebration of Bush's November victory, and that of the Republicans in Congress. And guess who gets the money from this orgy of felicitations to the GOP? A front group for Big Pharma that crusades against giving cheap, generic AIDS-fighting meds to the world's poorest victims of the AIDS pandemic." The event is a benefit for the Aids Responsibility Project, which counts as "partners" the giant trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Daimler Chrysler, drug maker Pfizer, U.S. Agency for International Development and the free-market website Tech Central Station.

"As President Bush campaigned for reelection pledging to protect doctors and insurance companies from patient lawsuits while easing the tax burden on businesses, industry groups spent record amounts of money lobbying to influence the White House, Congress and their constituents," the Los Angeles Times' Peter Wallsten writes. According to public records filed with the Senate, industry groups spent $1.1 billion on lobbyists and advertising campaigns for the first half of 2004, a new record. The top spenders were the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Medical Association. According to the watchdog group PoliticalMoneyLine.com, the two groups spent a combined $39 million to advocate medical liability limits. "Businesses and other interests sense an opportunity, and they are going to be spending a tremendous amount of money to ensure that they get their way," said Center for Responsive Politics's Larry Noble. Other big spenders include "General Electric Co., which spent $8.44 million on various issues, such as Iraq contracts and broadcast policies, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which spent about $8 million on legislation affecting Medicare, drug issues and other healthcare matters," the Times reports.

Public service announcements -- those informational spots that air for free on radio and TV -- are technically not supposed to be thought of in commercial terms, but Erica Iacono writes that "there are ways for corporate sponsors to gain recognition" through PSAs. In a PR Week feature examining how to get "the extra mile out of a PSA," Iacono highlights a King Oscar sardines partnership with the Women's Sports Foundation. Their PSA stars the Olympic swimmer Katrina Radke, who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, and says that exercise and a diet rich in Omega-3 can help with the illness. "At one point, the spot shows Radke opening a can of King Oscar sardines for lunch," PR Week reports. "Although a corporate entity's involvement with a PSA is traditionally supposed to be kept quiet, [the PSA's producer Ray] Salo says there are subtle ways to indicate the relationship without going over the line."

The "most important media story of the year," according to Steve Lovelady, managing editor of Campaigndesk.org, was "the way in which the press was so easily manipulated by spin machines all the way through the election campaign, partly thanks to the fact that it was hopelessly hobbled by some of its own outdated conventions and frameworks. And that, in turn, is related to its embarrassing performance in 2003 on weapons of mass destruction and on the question of an Iraqi tie to 9/11."

Conservative activist Grover Norquist, from Americans for Tax Reform, told Australian Financial Review journalist Tony Walker that three of his political priorities – tort reform, curtailing political contributions from unions, and promoting free trade – would have the combined effect of weakening support for the Democratic Party. Grover’s dream is that the conservative revolution runs for another 12 years. “If we do our job right over the next four years, weakening the institutions of the left, reducing the cost of government, reforming the government so that it becomes less intrusive in such a way that we deserve and win the presidency in 2008, that would give us another eight years," he said.

The Greensboro News & Record is looking to make a "transformative, revolutionary change" by turning its Web site into "more of an online community or public square," inviting bloggers and the general public to add and comment throughout their website. Journalism professor and citizen journalism advocate Jay Rosen offers some advice and other observations. Record editor Lex Alexander wants more. "We want -- we NEED -- your input and help," he writes on his own blog.

"Like Big Tobacco, Coca-Cola has the right to push their product. Like Big Tobacco, Coca-Cola knows of the health risks of their product, yet prefer silence to safeguarding children," writes John Borowski. After publishing an earlier article, Borowski was contacted by Coca-Cola's principal manager of scientific and regulatory affairs, who suggested the piece "misinformed" readers. "Soft drinks do not cause obesity, soft drinks do not cause osteoporosis and finally, there is no data to link soft drink consumption to diabetes," the Coca-Cola executive stated. After challenging those claims, Borowski writes, "May Coca-Cola executives wake up Christmas morning to find the gift of corporate integrity, ethical standards and moral fiber tucked neatly under their tree."

"Just before the election, a film about Iraq hit art house theaters around the country," writes Eartha Melzer. The "Voices of Iraq" documentary came from more than 400 hours of footage from 150 digital video cameras distributed to people around Iraq. Its tone is upbeat; "former Iraqi political prisoners are shown laughing off the stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib." The Washington DC-based Iraq Foundation, which receives State Department and National Endowment for Democracy funding, assisted the film's producers. The U.S. Army's former PR firm, Manning Selvage & Lee, coordinated publicity for the film. Given its timing, tone and connections, Melzer asks if Voices of Iraq was intended "to propagandize the U.S. population."

"With the U.S. government set to issue new dietary guidelines for Americans in January," food industry groups and PR firms are preparing to capitalize on the recommendations, writes PR Week. Burson-Marsteller's U.S. brand marketing director thinks "food companies will develop more functional foods [or 'techno-foods']and products whose ingredients have specific health benefits." She predicted, "Fiber is the next low-carb." The founder of the Food & Wine Radio Network countered, "Pepper is the new salt." But she warned that major food companies have low credibility. They will face "the same obstacles as big tobacco" when trying to convince consumers they really care about customers' health.

Concerns about the safety of Pfizer's Celebrex, Merck's Vioxx and other so-called COX-2 inhibitor drugs represent "perhaps the clearest instance yet of how the confluence of medicine and marketing can turn hope into hype - and how difficult it is for the Food and Drug Administration to monitor the safety of drugs after they have been approved for the market," reports the New York Times. "Having spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop their drugs, the makers of Celebrex and Vioxx, cheered on by Wall Street, had every motivation to expand their markets." Massive advertising campaigns targeted to consumers and health professionals drove "consumer demand for COX-2 drugs far beyond ... those patients who really benefit from them."

"While the forestry industry in [the Australian state of] Tasmania is notoriously defensive, Gunns appears to be setting new standards," reports the Independent. Gunns, Tasmania's largest private logging company, "recently threatened to sue a man who wrote a critical letter to a newspaper, and told a television station to broadcast more positive stories about logging." Gunns also filed an Aus.$6.3 million (U.S.$4.8 million) SLAPP lawsuit against 20 conservation groups and activists, including a 60-year-old grandmother, for "disrupting its business through grassroots action and blackening its name through 'corporate vilification.'" Gunns claims the activists "sabotaged machinery, destroyed property, blocked access to land and obstructed police at four logging sites."

When White House Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten introduced a "single mom" from Iowa to promote President Bush's plan to dismantle Social Security, she was presented as one of the "regular folks" in favor of private savings accounts. But Sandra Jaques, who addressed a White House economics conference on Thursday, "is not any random single mother," the New York Times' Edmund Andrews wrote. "She is the Iowa state director of a conservative advocacy group, FreedomWorks, whose founders are Jack F. Kemp, the former vice-presidential nominee, and Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader." FreedomWorks was formed by a merger in July 2004 of Citizens for a Sound Economy and Empower America. The American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias points out how a "little incidental dishonesty slip by" in Andrews' "otherwise excellent" article. Recently, the Times' Paul Krugman thought explaining the manufactured Social Security crisis was so important that he took "a break from my break" to debunk the hype: "Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it."

Representative Billy Tauzin, "a principal author of the new Medicare drug law, will become president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the chief lobby for brand-name drug companies." The Medicare law is generous to industry, forbidding price controls, regulations, or even negotiations with drug manufacturers "to secure lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries." Tauzin isn't alone; Thomas A. Scully, "the administration's main negotiator with Congress on the drug bill," is now a registered lobbyist for Abbott and Aventis. Powell Moore, "the Pentagon's chief lobbyist," is joining the law and lobbying firm McKenna Long & Aldridge, which has an "extensive national security practice." Senator Zell Miller is also joining the firm, reports The Hill.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report that the Justice Department's investigation into Qorvis Communications involves the Alliance for Peace and Justice, "a hastily arranged and now dormant group ... of well-established Washington organizations active in Middle East issues." The question is "whether the Alliance for Peace and Justice was used by Qorvis president Michael Petruzzello and his chief client, the Saudi Embassy's [Adel] al-Jubeir, to run advertisements that were really designed to burnish the Saudi government's image and influence the domestic debate on U.S. Mideast policy." Not disclosing the Saudi funding for the ads, which ran in 30 cities in 2002, may have "violated federal law on foreign-sponsored propaganda."

"Public diplomacy, the art of explaining America and its policies to the masses abroad, plays second fiddle to traditional, government-to-government diplomacy," and that's a problem, writes former U.S. Information Agency director John Hughes. Hughes advocates for recreating USIA, citing the 9/11 commission's call for "a vastly accelerated information program abroad to stop the 'next generation of terrorists.'" Nancy Snow, another former USIA staffer, criticizes a recent "innovations for the war on terror" report by defense contractor Battelle. "Missing from the Battelle definition [of public diplomacy] is the intercultural communication," Snow writes. Intercultural communication emphasizes "long-term strategies for mutual benefit and mutual trust," through educational and cultural exchanges; programs that should be "separated from the more tough-minded battlefield tactics associated with counterterrorism," says Snow.

In an effort to get wanted criminals to turn themselves in, the government of Saudi Arabia is running TV spots that say prison life is better than living at home. "I swear to God, they (jailers) are nicer than our parents," says one of the prisoners featured. James Sturcke reports that "Saudi authorities have aired militant confessions and interviews with fathers of wanted men as part of a public relations campaign to rally the public against radicals who have carried out attacks inside the kingdom, killing Saudis, other Arabs and westerners."

Dr. Ignacio Chapela, whose research revealed contamination of native Mexican corn with genetically engineered DNA, taught his last class at University of California, Berkeley. Chapela was denied tenure at Berkeley, despite "overwhelming support from his own department and from his academic peers," GM Watch founder Jonathan Matthews writes. Chapela had also been a critic of a $25 million research deal between UC Berkeley and the Swiss biotechnology company Novartis (now Syngenta). Chapela supporters believe he is being retaliated against for his criticism of the biotech industry. SpinWatch's Andy Rowell and Matthews exposed how Monsanto's Internet PR company, Bivings Group, was at the very heart of the campaign to vilify Chapela and his research.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, co-authors of the Center's 2003 book Weapons of Mass Deception, appear in filmmaker Danny Schechter's latest movie of the same title, but the movie is completely the creation of Schechter. A review on the Portland Independent Media website asks "what do you get when you cross relaxed media ownership laws, the military industrial complex, and public opinion? Weapons of Mass Deception. Insider turned outsider Danny Schechter makes his case in this expose of the mainstream media's 'fuzzy' coverage of the run-up to war. He shows us how with a little marketing, there's a sucker born every minute. If I only had a brain. The market makers, the PR firms, the embedded journalists, the 'fuzzy' coverage, the spin, and yes, even the lies...it's all in there. ... Schechter shows you how pseudo-patriotism, lack of 'guts', and trying to 'sell it', got in the way of delivering an important message...the entire truth." You can hear an interview with Schechter on Democracy Now.

"In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy – the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s," Robert Parry of Consortium News writes. Webb paid a high price for his "Dark Alliance" stories written for the San Jose Mercury News. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues and demoted by his paper, causing him to quit. Despite CIA internal investigations that later validated much of Webb's reporting, his career never recovered, and on Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide. "Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s," Parry writes. "Foreshadowing the media incompetence that would fail to challenge George W. Bush’s case for war with Iraq five years later, the major news organizations effectively hid the CIA’s confession from the American people."

A new campaign charges Sinclair Broadcast Group, the "largest single owner/operator of television stations in the United States," with "misusing public airwaves with partisan news programming." The campaign, by Media Matters for America, MoveOn, Free Press, AlterNet, and others, is focusing on the nightly commentary "The Point," by Sinclair spokesperson and lobbyist Mark Hyman. An analysis of "The Point" by Media Matters "found that the commentaries repeatedly attacked ... Democratic politicians," "referred to Democrats as the 'Angry Left,'" and "expressed support for Bush administration policies." The goal is getting Sinclair "to allow rebuttals to 'The Point' or even add another commentary with a more liberal point of view."

The nuclear industry is painting itself green. Proclaiming nuclear power as a clean-air solution to coal and gas fueled power plants, industry lobbyists are trying to win credits for not polluting the air. ''We have all this generation and it produces zero emissions," Brent Dorsey, director of corporate environmental programs for Entergy, which owns Vermont Yankee and the Pilgrim plant, told the Boston Globe. ''We are the unsung hero for clean air." Meanwhile, Corporate Watch's Chris Grimshaw reports, "Regaining public acceptance of nuclear power will be one of the PR world's biggest challenges according to PR guru, Dejan Vercic. Speaking at the 2004 AGM of the UK's Institute of Public Relations, in June, he said that within 5-10 years PR agencies would have to win back the nuclear industry's (and biotechnology's) 'licence to operate.'" Grimshaw's recent piece, "It's Official: No Dark Machiavellian Conspiracy for New Nuclear Power," looks at how nuclear industry PR campaigns are stoking media coverage in the UK.

Should "deceptive techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse an adversary" be adopted "for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations"? Last year, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld accelerated "a plan to advance the goal of information operations as a core military competency." Pentagon spokesperson Lawrence DiRita said, "Where the enemy is clearly using the media to help manage perceptions of the general public, our job is not perception management but to counter the enemy's perception management." Critics warn that the distinction between supposedly truthful public affairs and psychological operations will be lost, that "misleading information and falsehoods" intended for foreign audiences "could easily be repeated by American news outlets," and that "such deceptive missions could shatter the Pentagon's credibility."

Joseph Mailander of the Martini Republic weblog wonders if the U.S. government is "blog trolling" in Iraq: "touting the 'right' messengers with a mix of above-board, official recognition and below-board, ideology-based, sustained pump-priming, to generate a following for propagandistic messengers far beyond their natural level of interest." IraqTheModel, featuring two brothers in Baghdad, has become popular to the point that the brothers are touring the U.S., meeting President Bush and other prominent pro-war figures. "Contrast all this to the young woman computer systems analyst in Baghdad, Riverbend, who is in her views closer to the Iraqi opinion polls, especially with regard to Sunni Arabs, but who is not being feted in Washington, DC," notes Juan Cole. He adds, "The phenomenon of blog trolling, and frankly of blog agents provocateurs secretly working for a particular group or goal and deliberately attempting to spread disinformation, is likely to grow in importance."

"Four years ago, Tom Dugan’s company did some work for Peet’s Coffee & Tea by covertly plugging a Peet’s promotion online," writes Deborah Branscum. "He’d love to share the names of more recent clients, but none of them, he says, want to speak on the record." Stealth marketing is growing both online and offline to promote products ranging from martinis to cell phones to TV programs. According to Shawn Prez of the marketing agency Power Moves, stealth techniques are especially effective with teens. "By the time the message gets out, they don’t even know they’ve been hit; they don’t know that they’ve been marketed to. All they know is that their interest has been piqued."

In Kuwait, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked why soldiers "had to dig through landfills to find scrap metal to up-armor vehicles." The soldier who asked the question discussed it beforehand with an embedded reporter. In an email to colleagues at the Chattanooga Times Free Press, reporter Lee Pitts explained, "I was told yesterday that only soldiers could ask questions so I brought two of them along with me. ... Before hand we worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor." Pitts wrote, "This is what this job is all about - people need to know. The soldier who asked the question said he felt good." The paper signaled its support, writing that the soldier "chose to ask the question," while Pitts "used the tools available to him."

Bush's second term will focus on domestic policy, specifically "creating private Social Security accounts," "revising the tax code," "limiting the size and number of lawsuits, and changing immigration laws." The PR plan to sell these policies is underway. "In the next few weeks, White House officials, including [Karl] Rove, are planning to meet with Republican activists" to coordinate the campaign. "Several groups are raising money for an ad campaign that will likely be carried out by some of the same '527' groups active in the presidential campaign." Bush is asking the Heritage Foundation and other "well-funded conservative groups" to help, with "ads and commentary on television and in targeted publications." Lastly, to "circumvent critics in Congress and the media, the president will travel the country and warn of the disastrous consequences of inaction, as he did to sell his Iraq and terrorism policies."

"If a professor takes money from a company and then argues in the media for a position the company favors, is he an independent expert - or a paid shill?" asks Michael Schroeder. He cites examples such as Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland, who was paid by the the U.S. steel company Nucor Corp. to argue in favor of steel tariffs put in place by the Bush administration. "While it's difficult to ascertain how widespread the practice is, several Washington-based public-relations executives privately acknowledge that they routinely pay academics to speak on behalf of companies or issues, usually hiring experts who already espouse a certain viewpoint," writes Schroeder. "A particularly popular tool is for PR firms to ghost-write opinion pieces to run on newspaper editorial pages and then solicit experts to lend their name to the articles."

"When Jon Stewart 'busted' Spin Alley [the post-debate media feeding frenzy where campaign officials talk up their candidates for journalists] for in his famous confrontation with the Crossfire people (the most downloaded video clip ever, at the time) he was hitting on a practice that had grown more and more disreputable. As a designated spot for the practice of spin, the Alley only fell from legitimacy when an alternative practice rose up and called out to conscience of the press. It was one lesson of Campaign 2004: Forget about spinning the outcome, just fact check the debates," Lisa Stone writes in "Kind of a Drag: A Short History of Spin Alley and the Press."

"U.S. Special Operations Command, whose antiterrorist missions are usually conducted in utmost secrecy, is in the market for an ad agency," reports the St. Petersburg Times. A spokesman said the group "is merely doing market research to determine what commercial firms might add to its psychological operations." Of particular interest are "slick multilingual audio, video, print and Web packages." Critics of the plan include the Center for Media and Democracy's Sheldon Rampton. "If someone in the military gives out false information, they're answerable to the public, at least in theory. But if it's a private firm, a lot of that becomes less clear," he said. Rampton gave the example of the Rendon Group, which "is advising top levels of our military and government about how to prosecute the war and taxpayer dollars are being spent, but no one knows what they're doing."

The FBI searched three offices of the PR firm Qorvis Communications and delivered subpoenas to a fourth office. Officials confirmed the raids but refused further comment, saying there was an "ongoing investigation." Saudi Arabia is a major Qorvis client; the firm called the investigation a "compliance inquiry" under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Justice Department found that "the Saudi Arabian Embassy paid Qorvis $14.6 million for a six-month period," for such services as distributing material highlighting Saudi Arabia's "commitment in the war against terrorism and to peace in the Middle East." Qorvis also did media outreach, lobbied congressional staff members and Bush administration officials.

Discovery Communications International (DCI) is about to launch a cable TV network called "the Military Channel," which will focus on all aspects of the armed forces, military strategies and personnel throughout the ages.

After Philadelphia radio reporter Rachel Buchman couldn't get a right-wing website to stop sending her spam emails, she phoned their office and left an angry message that got her fired. "I acted in anger, and that was wrong," she admits, but we looked into the background of the site's owner and found a long history of scandal and cynical PR opportunism that ought to make you angry too.

What were the largest lobbying contracts on Washington DC's power corridor, K Street, in 2004? According to The Hill, top honors go to the Asbestos Study Group, who paid $5.5 million for six months of "lobbying and substantive expertise." The Asbestos Study Group is "a group of large companies that have been defendants in asbestos lawsuits," including Halliburton and Viacom. The "Patient Safety/ Pharmaceutical Systems Group," which includes Pfizer, Wyeth, Johnson & Johnson and other drug companies, paid $1.4 million for lobbying on "general patient safety and related pharmaceutical issues." Other major lobbiers include the Business Roundtable, Microsoft, United Airlines and Hewlett Packard.

The Washington, DC-based public affairs firm Susan Davis International "is handling the Pentagon's 'America Supports You' campaign to drum up support for the nearly 150,000 U.S. forces that may be occupying Iraq during the next four years," reports O'Dwyer's. "America Supports You," a Defense Department campaign, will run through May 2005. On December 2, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld presented an "America Supports You" dog tag to Bill O'Reilly on his Fox News show, calling O'Reilly "a terrific supporter of our troops." President Bush also plugged the "America Supports You" campaign during an address to Marines and their families at Camp Pendleton, California.

"In the end, the war in Iraq did not have the decisive impact on the election that many had expected," Michael Massing writes in the New York Review of Books. Why? Massing suggests that the American public may not have been "aware of just how bad things had gotten in Iraq." Of the many factors that shielded Americans from the "most brutal realities of Iraq," Fox News stands out. "The most striking feature of its coverage of the war in Iraq was, in fact, its lack of coverage," Massing writes. "A good example occurred on the Saturday before the election. That morning, the US military announced that eight Marines had been killed and nine others wounded in attacks in the Sunni Triangle. It was the highest US death toll in nearly seven months. After reading the news on the Web, I tuned in to Fox's 11 AM news summary. It made no mention of the dead Marines. The next hour was taken up by a feverish program on hot stock picks. Then came the noon newscast. After spending ten minutes on the Osama bin Laden tape, the presidential campaign, and the tight race in Ohio, it finally got around to informing viewers of the Marines' deaths. It then spent all of twenty seconds on them. As it turned out, that Saturday was a particularly bloody day in Iraq, with a series of bombings, mortar attacks, and ambushes throughout the country. Viewers of Fox, however, saw little of it."

On December 3, 1984 a toxic gas release from a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India killed at least 7,000 people. Two decades later, 15,000 additional people have died and 100,000 have health problems stemming from the leak of poison gases. Activists worldwide have called on Dow Chemical, which now owns Union Carbide, to take responsibility for the industrial disaster and make reparations. And for a brief moment, it appeared as if Dow was showing unimaginable leadership in corporate social responsibility, when the BBC reported that Jude Finisterra, who purported to be a Dow spokesman, admitted responsibility for the Bhopal disaster and offered $12 billion in compensation. As it turns out, however, Jude Finisterra was a creation of the Yes Men and the announcement was a hoax. Although the trick was unmasked by the time Wall Street opened, the Motley Fool reports European markets saw Dow share prices drop "as much as 3% on the news." The BBC contacted the Yes Men through their spoof website DowEthics.com, not to be confused with Dow Chemical's official site, Dow.com. And while activists run the websites Bhopal.org and Bhopal.net, Union Carbide sponsors Bhopal.com.

"Over the July 4 weekend last summer, at cookouts up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, guests arrived with packages of Al Fresco chicken sausage for their hosts to throw on the grill," writes Rob Walker. Unbeknownst to most of the other guests, the sausage-bearers were agents of a marketing firm called BzzAgent, which gives people rewards for plugging its clients' products. "This idea - the commercialization of chitchat - resembles a scenario from a paranoid science-fiction novel about a future in which corporations have become so powerful that they can bribe whole armies of flunkies to infiltrate the family barbecue," Walker writes.

"Stun-gun manufacturer Taser International has launched a media and client-relations campaign to counter mounting accusations that the company's weapons are dangerous and potentially deadly," reports PR Week. A report by the human rights organization Amnesty International called stun guns "particularly open to abuse." Taser's communications director called Amnesty "out of touch with law enforcement and community standards." Taser is "in the midst of test marketing and an ad campaign in the Phoenix area to promote the weapons for public sale." The campaign includes billboard, newspaper, TV and radio ads. "Taser uses Wexler & Walker for its public affairs and Public Strategies for strategic crisis advice," wrote PR Week.

"Many Americans consider television their most important source of news and information on health," but TV is also "one of the least trusted sources." A study of 840 TV news health segments by communications professor Gary Schwitzer revealed "10 troublesome trends," including extreme brevity, little or no data, exaggeration and commercialism. "Rather than reporting on a company's hopes for its product or the potential sales, journalists could better serve their audiences by reporting on the evidence for and against a product," Schwitzer writes. Moreover, there was "little coverage of health policy." Stories on "cosmetic health (wrinkle removing, liposuction, face lifts)" almost outnumbered stories on Medicare, Medicaid, managed care and health costs.

The Madison County Record, a new Illinois weekly newspaper, reports on "the filing of seemingly frivolous class action and other lawsuits" against businesses. The paper does not disclose that "the U.S. Chamber of Commerce created the Record as a weapon in its multimillion-dollar campaign against lawyers who file those kinds of suits." The local publisher said he decided against transparency because "I was afraid we'd be prejudged." The Chamber "plans to launch similar newspapers in counties that the pro-business lobby considers to be problems, particularly in West Virginia." Other examples of "advocacy media" include NRANews, from the National Rifle Association, and websites run by Capitol Advantage and Issue Dynamics.

"When federal drug officials suspected in 1992 that a popular allergy pill might cause heart problems, they turned to their own scientists. Their trial confirmed the danger, and the drug was pulled from the market," writes Gardiner Harris. "Eight years later, similar worries surrounded the arthritis pill Vioxx. But by then, the Food and Drug Administration had shifted gears, slashing its laboratories and network of independent drug safety experts in favor of hiring more people to approve drugs, changes that arose under an unusual agreement that has left the agency increasingly reliant on and bound by drug company money. Discovering Vioxx's dangers would take four more years. ... As a result of the agency's shifting its resources, almost everyone, including critics, outside drug safety experts, medical journal editors, some industry executives and even top agency officials, now agrees that its mechanisms for uncovering the dangers of drugs after they have been approved are woefully inadequate."

"Most scientists say that global warming is not only real, but is already contributing to extreme droughts, floods and the melting of the  polar ice caps," writes Melissa Fyfe. In Australia, however, skepticism about the science of global warming continues to find a home in the Lavoisier Group, a haven for engineers and retired captains of industry who think global warming is nothing to worry about. "In Australia, the group is the obvious embodiment of the movement, but the idea has also been taken up by right-wing think tanks, such as the Institute of Public Affairs, and also feeds into a global network," Fyfe writes. "It is a sophisticated machine that has successfully created the impression that climate change science is mired in uncertainty."

If you're in Madison, Wisconsin on December 7, don't miss the world premiere of War Is Sell, a new documentary by Madison-based filmmaker Brian Standing. The film examines the role of propaganda in promoting war and features the Center for Media and Democracy's Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, discussing their book Weapons of Mass Deception. "At least since World War I, governments have used sophisticated Madison Avenue techniques to rally the troops, not to mention the public, and Standing both analyzes those techniques and traces their history. ... Then he delves into the anthropology of violence, asks whether we're hard-wired for it or have to be persuaded. Then, having diagnosed the problem, he offers a cure: education. We visit a social studies class at a Wausau high school in which students are taught how to read an Uncle Sam poster," Isthmus' Kent Williams writes.

"Despite the prolonged arms embargo imposed by the United States on Indonesia," for the Indonesian military's serious human rights violations, other military assistance continues. Six U.S. Pacific Command members led a three-day discussion on "how to present information and news to the press" to 30 information officers from the Indonesian Army, Navy and Air Force. "The officers shared experiences in dealing with the media," reported the Jakarta Post. The U.S. Army Pacific Command's public affairs chief "hailed the Indonesian military program to embed journalists during the operation to crush rebels in Aceh." He said, "We did the same in Iraq."

The World Health Organization announced that 40 nations have ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The convention "changes the way Big Tobacco does business," said Kathryn Mulvey of Corporate Accountability International. The convention governs tobacco marketing, taxation and health warnings in signatory countries, starting in March 2005. Its terms will banish the Marlboro Man billboards currently in Mexico and end British American Tobacco-sponsored hip-hop contests in Ghana, not to mention Benson and Hedges cellphones in Sri Lanka. Perhaps readying for the change, BAT is sponsoring Kuwait's first corporate social responsibility conference, which is also supported by the United Nations Development Program.

Qorvis Communications received $7.3 million from Saudi Arabia during the six-month period ended Sept. 30 for promoting the Kingdom's "commitment to the war against terrorism and peace in the Middle East," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "The Washington, D.C.-based firm arranged one-on-one interviews with media luminaries, such as CNN's Wolf Blitzer, NBC's Tim Russert, CBS' John Roberts, NPR's Diana Rehm and Fox News' Tony Snow. Qorvis drafted letters to Congress, conducted surveys, prepared ads and created the www.aboutsaudiarabia.net for the Saudis. The Patton Boggs affiliate also arranged a 'road show' for Kingdom officials that featured stops in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Dallas, Seattle, Detroit, Chicago and Richmond."

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The Hill reports on a "sophisticated, multipronged plan" to support whomever George Bush nominates to the Supreme Court, after the expected resignation of ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The plan includes "pre-emptive" press releases, "to deflect liberal efforts to define the nominee," and public statements and floor speeches by Senate Republicans. Conservative groups are also involved; the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary "would handle grassroots work," and the Federalist Society "would provide substantive arguments for use in Senate and media debates." The "business community" is expected "to fund the communications campaign." On the other side, "People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice are preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to publicize the [nominee's] record."

A U.S. military spokesman deliberately misled CNN as part of "an elaborate psychological operation - or 'psy-op' - intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja," the Los Angeles Times reports. Hoping to prompt a reaction from guerrillas, the Marines told CNN on Oct. 14 that "Troops crossed the line of departure," indicating the start of the Fallouja offensive. In reality, the offensive did not begin until three weeks later. "Officials at the Pentagon and other U.S. national security agencies said the CNN incident was not an isolated feint - the type used throughout history by armies to deceive their enemies - but part of a broad effort underway within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism," the Times writes. Some top officials, however, object to the use of deceptive information. "Pentagon officials say [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Richard B.] Myers is worried that U.S. efforts in Iraq and in the broader campaign against terrorism could suffer if world audiences begin to question the honesty of statements from U.S. commanders and spokespeople," the Times writes.