Three new PR ventures "represent the globalization of a strategic concept that's been de rigeur in Washington for more than a decade: executing corporate PR campaigns as if they were political battles, in which someone wins, someone loses, and the client is the candidate," writes PR Week. One such effort is 360Advantage, a joint Burson-Marsteller and Quinn Gillespie venture. Another is Fleishman-Hillard's new "global network of public affairs shops," VOX Global Mandate. The third is ViaNovo, which will "offer management and communications consulting services," reports O'Dwyer's. ViaNovo's founders include Tucker Eskew, "who headed the White House's global communications office to coordinate the 'war on terror'"; Matthew Dowd, a Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney campaign media staffer; and Democrats Blaine Bull and James Taylor, both formerly of Public Strategies Inc.

"The Bush administration is expanding efforts to influence Iran's internal politics," including increasing aid to exile groups and airing "longer broadcasts criticizing the Iranian government" on Voice of America satellite TV programs. Under secretary of state for political affairs R. Nicholas Burns said the United States is "taking a page from the playbook" on Ukraine and Georgia. In those two countries, "opposition and pro-democracy groups" given U.S. funding "later supported the peaceful overthrow of the governments in power." Through the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. State Department has already spent $500,000 to investigate "human rights, business enterprise and women's rights" in Iran. Over the next year, the State Department will spend $3 million, "for the benefit of Iranians living inside Iran," including on "broadcast activities, Internet programs and 'working with people inside Iran.'"

"Close to 100 New England towns have passed resolutions opposing the unregulated use of GMOs (genetically modified organisms); nearly a quarter of these have called for local moratoria on the planting of GMO seeds. In 2004, three California counties, Mendocino, Trinity and Marin, passed ordinances banning the raising of genetically engineered crops and livestock." In response, "fifteen states recently have introduced legislation removing local control of plants and seeds. Eleven of these states have already passed the provisions into law." The move to deny local control over food was launched at a May 2004 American Legislative Exchange Council forum, where industry groups proposed a "Biotechnology state uniformity resolution." Previously, the tobacco industry used a similar approach. A Philip Morris employee explained, "By introducing preemptive statewide legislation, we can shift the battle away from the community level back to the state legislatures where we are on stronger ground."

The industry lobby group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) is launching "an aggressive new PR plan," highlighting its new CEO, former Congressman and cancer survivor Billy Tauzin. According to PhRMA senior vice-president of communications Ken Johnson, the new plan includes reorganizing media relations "almost like a beat system," with point people for "state, federal, or international outreach." PhRMA has also launched a radio series called Healthcare Now, "which Johnson likens to an ANR (audio news release) that can be played in small markets without health reporters." PhRMA is also "building an onsite studio" to allow Tauzin to do more television interviews and speaking events. Johnson said part of PhRMA's PR strategy is to make Tauzin "an evangelist for the pharmaceutical industry."

A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) advertising campaign, coinciding with Laura Bush's Middle East visit last week and designed to improve America's image among Palestinians, lacked a Palestinian spokesperson. "None of the Palestinian entertainers or athletes approached by the agency would serve as 'goodwill ambassador'," so an "Israeli Arab soccer player" was recruited. Billboards and TV ads highlight USAID education and water projects in the Palestinian territories, in line with recent Council on Foreign Relations suggestions to make U.S. aid to Muslim countries more visible. But USAID "cancelled plans to contract a firm to develop an integrated communications plan for its initiative to foster public-private alliances in its overseas work," the Global Development Alliance. No reason was given for canceling the plan to promote "USAID's successes."

Joan Lowy notes that environmental groups like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and the Texas Campaign for the Environment are having success with campaigns that bypass government and directly lobby corporations instead. The trend bemuses Eric Dezenhall, the president of Dezenhall Resources, a Washington D.C. PR firm with a reputation for promoting aggressive strategies against activist groups. "The desire of corporations to be accepted by the marketplace and to be personally liked has spawned an entire industry of activism and corporate capitulation that I've never seen before - it's unprecedented ... I've seen situations where companies are simply being harassed so badly that it pays to get out of a certain endeavor just to make the harassment stop," he said.

The Iranian presidential campaign of Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, "a conservative former revolutionary guard air force commander whose candidacy has the blessing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei," is patterned after that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, reports the Guardian. "The Qalibaf campaign is deploying focus groups," using them to compile "a list of 10 key priorities, including unemployment, inflation, social security and quality of life issues." In the campaign office, "strategists and policy wonks confer daily on how to market Mr. Qalibaf ... to Iran's vast army of young voters as a vigorous moderniser." The campaign is playing down Mr. Qalibaf's "strong religious convictions," showing him "without a beard" and "moonlighting as a commercial pilot for a local airline." Some Iranian reformers are criticizing "Mr. Qalibaf's carefully honed image of studied reasonableness," pointing to his 1999 call to crack down on student demonstrators.

A new report from the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that better U.S. communications with Muslim countries require "listening more, a humbler tone, and focusing on bilateral aid and partnership, while tolerating disagreement on controversial policy issues." The report, which was based on focus groups held in Morocco, Egypt and Indonesia, says U.S. tsunami relief, the Iraqi election and new Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts provide "a window of opportunity to change Muslim attitudes." Specific recommendations include engaging "local and regional media via press releases, interviews, Op-Eds, press conferences, and site visits," and launching "an advertising campaign on U.S. aid and support for reform in local and regional media, and acknowledge the U.S. government as the source." Focus group members "do not take seriously U.S. government media, such as Radio Sawa, al-Hurra TV, and Hi magazine, as information sources."

Product placements on television shows are booming, with this year's market expected to total $4.2 billion. "Advertisers pay as much as $2 million an episode to get their products featured on NBC's 'The Apprentice,'" reports the Los Angeles Times. At the TV industry's annual sales drive, actor Amanda Bynes of WB's "What I Like About You" said of her show's characters, "This season we found out, like, they eat Pringles and use Herbal Essence shampoo. Next season, we hope to find out what cellphones they're using and what cars they drive." Other recent product placements include a couple on Fox's "The O.C." looking at AmericanAirlines.com, a character on ABC's "Desperate Housewives" working for Buick LaCrosse, and contestants on CBS' "Survivor:Palau" using Home Depot tools. The Federal Communications Commission's Jonathan Adelstein said the current standard of listing paid sponsorships in the show's closing credits is inadequate disclosure.

In a column for Digital Producer magazine, Steven Klapow recounts that a producer of video news releases for an oil company was under strict instructions to avoid including images, including on B-roll footage, that may not look good for the sponsoring company. "We have to avoid any shots that can be taken out of context," the producer said. The sort of shots that could cause problems, Klapow wrote, includes "steam emitting from a refinery could be perceived or described as smoke" and "any dirty areas in shots that are captured at filling stations." The producers of fake news are opposing the on-screen disclosure of the sponsors of corporate videos.

Jonathan Adelstein of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission called "for an investigation of experts who tout products on television without disclosing payments from the manufacturers." The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have reported on "technology and other experts who are paid tens of thousands of dollars by such companies as Sony, Apple and Hewlett-Packard" and who have praised those companies' products "on NBC's 'Today' show, other network programs and during 'satellite tours' of local TV stations." Such payola violates federal law and could result in fines of up to $10,000 for repeat offenders. "It's very deceptive to pretend to be an objective expert when in fact you're shilling for some private company," said Adelstein.

With a yearly budget of over $40 million, Al Hurra, a U.S. supported TV channel for the "Arab World," is "one of the US government's most expensive public diplomacy efforts yet," reports MediaCorp News, a Singapore-based media group. Since its launch in February 2004, most news stories about the 24-hour Arabic-language satellite station report that the channel is viewed as little more than U.S. propaganda in the form of news and entertainment. Al Hurra's credibility as an independent news outlet is challenged by the German magazine Der Spiegel's report that the station's "50 staff members in Iraq have been instructed to be on the lookout for signs of improvement. 'If the power comes back on in a part of the city, we see this as being more newsworthy than reporting that the power is out someplace else,' says one employee."

"Obsessive coverage of urban crime by local television stations, UCLA law professor Jerry Kang argued in the Harvard Law Review ... is one of the engines driving lingering racism in the United States. So counterproductive is local broadcast news, he says, that it is time the FCC stopped using the number of hours a station devotes to local news as evidence of the station's contribution to the 'public interest,' which has traditionally been a requirement for a broadcast license." Kang cites psychological research that racist assumptions linking people of color with violence and crime are weakened, after "footage of a respected black figure like Bill Cosby or Martin Luther King, Jr." is viewed. Local TV news reinforces racist stereotypes, Kang argues, pointing to a 13-month study of Los Angeles stations that found crime stories led broadcasts "51 percent of the time and took up 25 percent of total newscast minutes."

Britain's Channel 4 documentary "Undercover in New Labour" includes footage from "a reporter wearing hidden cameras who volunteered to work on the party's election campaign and ended up being drafted to work at its national PR headquarters." The documentary shows Labour staff using "party supporters in key professions from medicine and the law to the armed forces and the police, who were prepared to appear on TV and in the papers and lie through their teeth that their support for this or that policy was entirely unsolicited," writes Mark Borkowski. But "is singling out New Labour for criticism reasonable," Borkowski asks, when astroturfing "has been going on for decades in business, especially among the oil, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries?" Undercover reporters were placed with Britain's three main political parties, "but it was decided the strongest story was the way the Labour campaign was run," an anonymous source told the Guardian.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which greatly increased spending on private PR firms in 2003, "is looking for at least three agencies that will be responsible for nearly all of its outreach programs over the next five years." CMS's current "preferred" firms - the only ones it solicits pitches from - are Ketchum, GCI Group, Ogilvy PR and American Education Development. "Under the last umbrella contract," reports PR Week, "Ketchum led a $25 million integrated marketing campaign to drive people to the Medicare (800) number and website." The new $17.25 million contract will involve "research, messaging, social marketing, education, training, and media relations." One priority will be "raising awareness of reforms mandated by the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act," which Congress mandated additional funding for "education and enrollment efforts around."

Like General Motors and Morgan Stanley, the energy company BP "has adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward negative editorial coverage." BP's media buyer, the WPP firm MindShare, now "demands that ad-accepting publications inform BP in advance of any news text or visuals they plan to publish that directly mention the company, a competitor or the oil-and-energy industry" and give BP "the option to pull any advertising from the issue without penalty." An unnamed magazine executive called BP's new policy a "stupid request," but said his company has "unwritten guidelines with advertisers from several industries, including auto, airlines and tobacco, to pull their ads if related negative stories are in the issue." In 1997, following similar demands from Chrysler, the Magazine Publishers of America and the American Society of Magazine Editors took a stance against magazines giving advertisers "a sneak peek at stories, photos or tables of contents."

In an essay for the Public Library of Science, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith, argues that while corporate advertising may be the most obvious source of revenue for medical journals, they are "the least corrupting." More significant, he writes, are the clinical trials the journal publishes which carry "the journal's stamp of approval (unlike the advertising)." While journals can more tightly screen what gets published, Smith thinks more fundamental steps are required to "stop journals from being beholden to companies." He argues more public funding to research treatments is needed, and journals should consider not publishing trials at all. Trial results, he suggests, "should be made available on regulated Web sites. Instead of publishing trials, journals could concentrate on critically describing them." But the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine accused Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck of "making a mockery" of an online list of drug trials, saying the companies' entries "are written in a way that they are trying to hide what they are doing."

A worker who knows Social Security "could run out before they retire," a couple with children who like "the idea of leaving something behind to the family," and a single parent who wants "more retirement options and security" than Social Security offers - all younger than 29. Those are people the White House asked the group Women Impacting Public Policy to recruit for a Rochester, New York event promoting Bush's Social Security plan. The participants in a Wisconsin event last week "appeared to mirror" the same profile, reported the Los Angeles Times. A White House spokesperson said, "Every president ... has used the bully pulpit to talk about their agenda." Barbara Kennelly, a former Democratic Congresswoman who heads the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said, "It's unfortunate that the president never hears any opposition to a plan that has a lot of opposition."

"The vilification of threatening research as 'junk science' and the corresponding sanctification of industry-commissioned research as 'sound science' has become nothing less than standard operating procedure in some parts of corporate America," writes Clinton-era Energy Department epidemiologist David Michaels. One example is beryllium, an "extremely toxic" metal used in nuclear warheads. Beryllium producers hired two "product defense" firms to "dispute and reanalyze data showing adverse health effects." Michaels says industry groups "have grown more brazen since George W. Bush became president," pointing to industry-friendly appointments to an advisory panel on childhood lead poisoning and the Data Quality Act. The Data Quality Act (promoted at the state level by the American Legislative Exchange Council) has been "used by groups bankrolled by the oil industry to discredit the National Assessment on Climate Change" and "by the Salt Institute to challenge the advise of the National Institutes of Health that Americans should reduce their salt consumption."

The London office of U.S.-based PR giant Hill & Knowlton signed a $600,000 contract with the government of Uganda, "to improve Uganda's stained reputation as a human rights abuser and democracy laggard." Foreign Minister Sam Kuteesa confirmed the contract, which calls for Hill & Knowlton "to improve Uganda's image with donors and to help blunt damaging reports from human rights watchdogs that have been highly critical of the government." In Uganda, political activity is "restricted" and planned elections in 2006 "have been overshadowed by a controversial bid to amend the constitution so President Yoweri Museveni can stand for a third term." Reports by the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch have "documented recent cases of torture by Ugandan security forces against political opponents, alleged rebels and criminal suspects."

"Back when Mel Gibson's movie 'The Passion of the Christ' was arousing passions nationwide, a promotion packet arrived at local public radio station KAZU," writes Karen Ravn in California. It included "a transcript of questions an enterprising reporter might want to ask Jim Caviezel, the movie's star," and "a CD of Caviezel-recorded answers." As KAZU's news director at the time, Bernhard Drax, described, "The transcript would say, 'Hi, Jim, how are you?' and on the CD, Jim would say, 'I'm fine. It's good to be here.'" KAZU didn't air the canned interview, but Drax said he understood why other radio stations might. "The pressure in local newsrooms ... is incredible," said Drax. Audio news releases like the Caviezel interview help ease the "economic pressure" on strapped radio newsrooms.

"Morgan Stanley, whose battle with unhappy shareholders has played out on the business pages, is warning prominent newspapers that it could pull its advertising if it objects to articles." Morgan Stanley's new ad policy says the company "must be notified" of any "objectionable editorial coverage," so that a "last-minute change" in its advertising can be made. If notification is impossible, the policy directs all ads to be canceled, "for a minimum of 48 hours," reports Advertising Age. Morgan Stanley discussed the policy with the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and other major publications. The Journal's publisher called it impractical, since "the ad department has no knowledge of what stories are running." An anonymous "high-ranking editor" told AdAge, "There's a fairly lengthy list of companies that have instructions like this." Last month, General Motors pulled its ads from the Los Angeles Times, due to negative coverage.

"In the year or so before the general election" in Britain, "the nuclear industry slowly but surely put together a classy public relations act," report Jonathan Leake and Dan Box. "Last October, British Energy appointed Craig Stevenson, formerly Monsanto's top UK lobbyist, as head of government affairs. ... In December, BE enlisted Helen Liddell, the former energy minister, to provide 'strategic advice.'" This "on top of the £1m BE paid to another PR firm, Financial Dynamics." The Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, which is "charged with cleaning up the mess from Britain's previous nuclear programme, poached Jon Phillips," Heathrow Airport's PR head who led a "successful campaign for a fifth terminal at Heathrow despite furious public opposition." The waste disposal body Nirex hired "the Promise public relations firm to promote a multimillion-pound rebranding and renaming exercise," while the UK Atomic Energy Authority "employed Grayling Political Strategy to help raise its profile."

"Major tobacco companies agreed to stop pushing for their products to be promoted in the arts from 1998," but "the number of tobacco brand appearances in U.S. films aimed at children has not fallen significantly," according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The percentage of "films aimed at children show[ing] tobacco brand names, or trademarks" fell slightly from 15 to 12, after 1998. Yet, in the ongoing federal racketeering trial against major tobacco companies, industry lawyers claimed companies have "voluntarily" adopted tough advertising restrictions. A Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company lawyer "suggested that the companies had stopped advertising in magazines with youth readerships of more than 15 percent or more than two million," reported the New York Times. Government witness and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids president Matthew Myers disputed the claim, pointing out recent ads in Sports Illustrated.

"If you are wondering why Americans are losing the wars on cancer, heart disease and diabetes, you might look at the funding sources of the major public health groups," Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman write. "Big corporations dump big money into these groups. And pretty soon, the groups start taking the line of the big corporations. Case in point: the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Earlier this month, the ADA cut a deal with candy and soda pop maker Cadbury Schweppes. Here's the deal - Cadbury Schweppes kicks in a couple million dollars to the ADA. In return, the company gets to use the ADA label on its diet drinks - plus the positive publicity generated by the deal. Cadbury makes Dr. Pepper and such nutritious treats as Cadbury's Cream Egg. You would have to have your head buried deeply in the sand to deny that sugar-filled soda is fueling childhood obesity - which in turn in is fueling type 2 diabetes." In an interview with the Corporate Crime Reporter, ADA's Richard Kahn emphasized that the ADA logo would only appear on "products that are better to eat."

Television journalist Bill Moyers harangued Corporation for Public Broadcasting chair Kenneth Tomlinson at the recent National Media Reform Conference. Tomlinson is "aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias," according to the May 2 edition of the New York Times. "The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets," Moyers told the audience of 1,400. "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth." The veteran journalist skewered Tomlinson (mp3) for spending $10,000 of public money to monitor PBS's "Now with Bill Moyers" and refusing to release the results. "That great mob that is democracy is rarely heard, and that's not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and Capitol," Moyers said. "There is a great chasm between those of us in the business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much like audiences and not enough like citizens."

In 2001, Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky (now on trial for fraud and tax evasion) hired APCO Worldwide, "to restore investors' trust in the company," reported O'Dwyer's at the time. Lucy Komisar writes that, at APCO's suggestion, Khodorkovsky's Yukos Oil Corporation "created the Open Russia Foundation ... to build cooperation between Russia and the West." Yet, the foundation's activities "seemed aimed more at cultivating powerful friends." Last year, Yukos retained the Burson-Marsteller firm BKSH, "to keep Washington abreast of political, legal and business developments." In March 2005, APCO "launched a series of advertisements" on the New York Times website, "designed to look like a newsletter named 'Russia in Focus.'" One issue "included an attack on the Khodorkovsky prosecution co-authored by Stuart Eizenstat (incidentally a member of APCO's international advisory board) and Jonathan Winer - both former Clinton State Department officials."

The Washington Post reports on how House Majority Whip Roy Blunt "has converted what had been an informal and ad hoc relationship between congressional leaders and the Washington corporate and trade community into a formal, institutionalized alliance." Blunt's "organization of whips and lobbyist vote counters ... has delivered more than 50 consecutive victories for the GOP leadership on tough fights over issues including tax and trade bills, District of Columbia school choice and tort reform." The "de facto 'executive committee'" of "the Republican leadership's K Street lobbying arm" includes Ed Gillespie of Quinn Gillespie & Associates; Mark Isakowitz and Samantha Poole of Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock; Tony Rudy of Alexander Strategy Group and Greenberg Traurig; Lyle Beckwitch of the National Association of Convenience Stores; and Ralph Hellmann of the Information Technology Industry Council.

"The National Academy of Sciences would investigate the effectiveness of dredging PCB-contaminated sediment under a directive written largely by General Electric Co. and attached to a House of Representatives spending bill last week," reported the Poughkeepsie Journal. A GE spokesperson said, "We think the public and regulators will benefit from knowing more about these issues." But environmentalists and Senator Charles Schumer say the study would needlessly delay the cleanup of New York's Hudson River, which was contaminated by PCBs from GE plants in the 1970s. An Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson said, "We have the data to prove [dredging] is the best thing for this river, for the environment, and for the communities here." GE's efforts to delay the Hudson River cleanup contrast with its recently launched $90 million pro-environmental PR and ad campaign, called "Ecomagination."

According to former member of Congress Billy Tauzin, now the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America's head lobbyist, "drug companies [are] trying to develop a voluntary code of conduct for the advertising of prescription medicines on television and in print." Tauzin said "a good strong code" would likely be issued this June or July. However, "one purpose" for the code "is to fend off more stringent federal regulation," according to the New York Times. "Better to self-regulate than to have someone else tell you how to conduct your business," one pharmaceutical marketing chief told Advertising Age. PhRMA's announcement comes as mounting evidence suggests "drug sales don't necessarily rise or fall as TV ads are boosted or reduced," because, unlike other products, "a consumer can't buy a prescription drug without a doctor's signature," reported the Wall Street Journal. Drug ads have come under increasing scrutiny following "the safety controversy over highly advertised painkillers Vioxx from Merck & Co. and Celebrex from Pfizer."

Jay Rosen, who is an Associate Professor at New York University's Journalism Department and author of the PressThink blog, believes the rise of blogging is posing a major challenge to the PR industry. Rosen argues that because PR is "totally about control," the PR industry will struggle to cope with the proliferation of sources of information and opinions available on the Internet. Journalists, Rosen says, have become "quite reliant on public relations people," while "bloggers don’t really care" about them. Two weeks ago, Richard Edelman, the CEO of Edelman, wrote with alarm about bloggers' disdain for PR people. Earlier this year, his company released a report on some of the implications of blogging for companies, while Issue Dynamics has created a blogger practice group.

Just weeks after the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General's damning report on the Ketchum / Armstrong Williams contract to promote the No Child Left Behind legislation, the department "is looking for a vendor to help it measure how well it is communicating with the public." According to PR Week, a major concern is the department's failure to get adequate "return on investment." The new Education Department contractor will "compile a daily list of placements and transcript summaries of local and national news programs that mention the department and its officials," and "provide an analysis of the audience that each broadcast outlet reaches."

The conservative legal group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the Defense Department, for not responding to their March 2004 Freedom of Information Act request on what "strategic influence, perception management, strategic information warfare and/or psychological operations" contracts the Pentagon has signed since September 11, 2001. Judicial Watch is especially concerned with "Empower Peace," an Internet-based program run by the secretive Rendon Group, to link "American school age children with their counterparts in the Arab world." Judicial Watch says the site might be "propagandizing the American public," and maintains that the Pentagon has spent $40 million on the project, "while guys are running around getting killed in Iraq." Rick Rendon calls Judicial Watch's charges "absolutely not true," saying Empower Peace receives no Pentagon funding.

One of PR Watch's "usual suspects," Steven J. Milloy, managed to get himself invited to be a judge for the 2004 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Journalism Awards: Online Category. Milloy, who calls himself "The Junkman," is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a commentator for FoxNews.com, and the creator of JunkScience.com. He earns his living attacking scientific research and public health activism that goes against industry interests. While Milloy claims the judgeship on his website, the AAAS does not list Milloy as a judge in last year’s competition. "According to AAAS spokesperson Ginger Pinholster, Milloy was invited to be a judge but quickly notified the other panelists that he had conflicts of interest due to his affiliation with the Cato Institute, [a] libertarian think tank," journalist Paul Thacker writes. "'It was just kind of a snafu, and he had a nice lunch on us,' she said in a phone message. 'We've already dealt with it. This is a sponsored, nonprofit program, and I just want it to go away.' 'This is somewhat like discovering that Karl Rove [President Bush's chief political adviser] was a judge in a contest for political journalism,' says Seth Borenstein, a national correspondent who covers the environment, science, and health for the Washington, D.C., bureau of Knight Ridder."

"An Agriculture Department agency paid a freelance writer at least $7,500 to write articles touting federal conservation programs and place them in outdoors magazines," reports the Washington Post. In 2003, the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service hired Dave Smith to "research and write articles for hunting and fishing magazines describing the benefits of NRCS Farm Bill programs." None of the three articles Smith published, in the Outdoor Oklahoma and Washington-Oregon Game & Fish magazines, disclosed the USDA payments. An NRCS public relations staffer offered the position to Smith because, according to NRCS head David Gagner, "We truly didn't think we had somebody who was a good enough expert on these issues, and that type of writer." Gagner said NRCS would consider similar contracts in the future, but would ensure articles disclosed "that that writing was done by, for" the USDA.

The Senior Vice-President with Dittus Communications, Kevin Walker, believes that Taser International, which makes the Taser stun guns that have caused dozens of deaths in the United States alone, is misunderstood. "There's a lot of misinformation out there," he told PR Week for a feature on crisis management. "Balanced coverage is what we're looking for," he said. In mid-June, Walker will be speaking at a Public Affairs Council-hosted workshop speaking on "Community Involvement and Corporate Social Responsibility". Peter Holran, a senior director of Wexler and Walker Public Policy Associates, who also works on the Taser International account, attributed the focus on the company to the fact that the guns are electric, which is "a mysterious quantity to a lot of people."

"Newsroom managers throughout the Middle East recognize the need for improved standards among the region's journalists, and training programs are proliferating," writes Gordon Robinson, director of the Middle East Media Project, in the summary to his report "Tasting Western Journalism: Media Training in the Middle East." (PDF) Robinson finds that media training is turning into a "large and growing business" paid for, in part, by U.S. funds, including the Departments of State and Defense, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International Republican Institute. Britain, the European Union and Japan also support media training programs as well as private foundations like John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. "Some, however, question the utility of it all. By some estimates as much as $30 million was spent on media training in the Balkans and, by some accounts, things are worse now than they were before the well-meaning Westerners arrived. Moreover, the training environment in the Middle East now involves many of those same players. So in the Middle East, it needs to be asked when the money is spent, what the trainees really will take back to their newsrooms," Robinson writes.

PR Week reports on the video news release industry's response to Senator Byrd's one-year measure and the Truth in Broadcasting Act, both of which require disclaimers for pre-packaged "news" segments. The CEO of D S Simon Productions believes "the temporary amendment was preferable to the permanent ban because it is tied to specific spending." The CEO of Medialink said of the Truth in Broadcasting Act, "I think this is a law written by people not in the broadcasting or PR business," and warned that the legislation "could limit free speech." The president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association called the legislation "unnecessary," since the "accepted standard is to clearly identify material from outside sources." She also said that "government regulation of news content" would be "unprecedented and unconstitutional."

General Electric began "heavily advertising" its "new company-wide environmental initiative" called "ecomagination." Its goals are "to decrease pollution from its products and to double research and development spending on cleaner technologies." (According to Grist, one TV ad "features scantily clad models dusted with soot," as an announcer says, "Thanks to emissions-reducing technologies from GE, the power of coal is getting more beautiful every day.") The "ecomagination" launch followed a year of "planning and packaging," and was assisted by Edelman, O'Dwyer's reported. Some environmentalists "praised the effort for having measurable performance targets" and addressing global warming. The Sierra Club's Hudson River Program was less enthusiastic. "When you scratch beneath the public relations surface, I'm afraid they have unfinished business in terms of environmental protection," said director Chris Ballantyn, referring to GE's stalling on cleaning up PCBs that leaked into the Hudson from its factories.

"It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change," writes George Monbiot. He traces a claim by botanist David Bellamy, that the world's glaciers "are not shrinking but in fact are growing." The World Glacier Monitoring Service verified to Monbiot that "most of the world's glaciers are retreating." Monbiot tracks Bellamy's claim to a self-published book by a "former architect," then to a Lyndon LaRouche-associated magazine, then to online mentions by climate change skeptic Professor Fred Singer, the Cooler Heads Coalition and National Center for Public Policy Research, among others. Singer cites a 1989 Science article, which, according to Monbiot, doesn't exist. Finally, Bellamy misrepresented his faulty source, due to a typing error. The UK Times also reports on bad science - a study funded by Dow Chemical Company claiming their employees have "favourable mortality patterns" compared to the general population, despite high incidences of "an asbestos-related lung cancer."

As predicted, the British government has launched a post-election push for more nuclear power stations. The Director-General of Energy Policy advised incoming ministers to raise the issue now, as "it is generally easier to push ahead on controversial issues early in a new parliament." The Nuclear Industry Association is lobbying for ten new reactors, "to combat climate change." The Independent reports that one-third of the members of the British Committee on Radioactive Waste Management "have serious conflicts of interest." Four of 12 members are paid consultants to firms employed by the committee. Yet, "Ministers recognise that to gain public support for a pro-nuclear policy, they first have to resolve the problem of what to do with existing nuclear waste." The New York Times reports that nuclear energy will not reduce oil imports, as President Bush has claimed, because less than three percent of oil consumed in the United States goes towards electricity production.

Concerned at rising rates of soldiers' non-combat deaths, the U.S. Army Combat Readiness Center hired two PR firms, Pario and Reingold, to "sell" safety measures. The three-year, $800,000 campaign will include "brochures, web teasers, and movie trailers to play in the Army theater," as well as messages for "the Army's news and television services." In its research, Pario found that "safety messages don't resonate with young people who believe they are invincible, but they are still concerned about the safety of their peers." Pario's CEO said, "Don't let your unit down - that's what resonates. It's safety, but we do it without saying safety." From fiscal year 2004 to 2005, "aviation and off-duty ground accidents in the Army have risen more than 17%."

Former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman has opened a consulting firm, the Whitman Strategy Group, "whose first client is a chemical company negotiating with the EPA over the cleanup of arsenic-contaminated soil at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y." The company, FMC Corporation, "is responsible for 136 Superfund sites across the country," "has been subject to 47 EPA enforcement actions," and has, over the past seven years, "spent more than $16.5 million on lobbying." Whitman hasn't worked directly with FMC, but said she would probably help them "improve their image" and gain "access to the people they need to speak to." Eileen McGinnis, formerly "Whitman's chief of staff at the EPA," is "the only partner at Whitman's firm who has worked with FMC" to date. McGinnis called FMC "a good corporate citizen."

While U.S. propaganda for foreign audiences is nothing new, questions of how to promote U.S. policy and polish the U.S. image persist. Radio Sawa, a U.S. supported radio channel broadcast in the Middle East, combines Arabic and Western pop music with news written by Voice of America staff. "It’s tough to independently assess Sawa content from afar, but program summaries and interview transcripts from the State Department help," the Columbia Journalism Review's Corey Pein writes. "Sometimes, the questions asked by Sawa correspondents are more revealing than the answers:

• "Can you please state what is our stated policy towards the fence that the Israelis are building right now?
• "What is the U.S. going to do, in order to swipe away this illusion and this fear of the Arabs and the Iraqis of something called the 'U.S. occupation,' which is not really what the U.S. is doing in Iraq?

"Iraqis accustomed to road checkpoints and house-by-house raids may not easily be convinced that they are living through an 'illusion' of occupation. And whatever 'our' policy is, 'fence' is a loaded term for the concrete wall snaking through Israel and Palestine," Pein writes.

Two members of the animal welfare committee of Yum Brands Inc, KFC's parent company, resigned after being asked to sign a confidentiality agreement which would have required them to refer all media inquiries to KFC's corporate headquarters. Over the last three years Dr. Temple Grandin of Colorado State University and Dr. Ian Duncan of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, have advised KFC on improving animal welfare standards. Both objected to the proposed agreement as amounting to censorship. "I feel very strongly that I can talk freely to the press about how the program's working, what's been going on with the program," Grandin told Reuters. Duncan said that his reading of the agreement was that "If someone phoned me up and said 'You are on the KFC animal welfare committee,' I was bound to say 'No comment'."

For one year, U.S. government agencies will be banned "from issuing video news releases that do not clearly identify" the government as the source of the footage. Congressional members "agreed to include the measure in an emergency spending bill," which is why the restriction expires after one year. The Truth in Broadcasting Act, scheduled for a Senate Commerce committee hearing on May 12, would make the ban permanent. The Center for Media and Democracy and the media reform group Free Press urged lawmakers not only to pass permanent restrictions, but also to ban the covert airing of both government- and corporate-funded "fake news."