"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.