Fake news is being used in the Iraq propaganda war, reports the Los Angeles Times. "[T]he U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military 'information operations' troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers. ... The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. ... Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as 'Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism,' since the effort began this year. The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with ... Lincoln Group which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets."

Swiss citizens backed a five-year moratorium on commercial release of genetically modified plants and animals, despite opposition from their government and industry groups. Fifty-five percent of the voters backed the moratorium. The ballot initiative followed the collection of 100,000 signatures opposing a 2004 law approving commercial release of genetically engineered crops. "All the farmers' organisations were behind this proposal, which they see as a chance for Swiss agriculture," Daniel Ammann, a spokesman for the pro-moratorium coalition, told Reuters. Adrian Bebb, from Friends of the Earth, said the vote showed that "the public doesn't want to eat genetically modified food." Two of the companies opposing the moratorium were Swiss-based Syngenta and Nestle.

The Bush administration recently appointed Paul Bonicelli to be deputy director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where he will oversee programs that promote democracy and good governance internationally. Bonicelli's last job was dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College, a Christian fundamentalist institution that requires students to sign a 10-part "statement of faith" declaring, among other things, that non-Christians will be condemned to hell, "confined in conscious torment for eternity." "What's wrong with this picture is that the USAID programs Bonicelli will run are important weapons in the arsenal of Bush's new public diplomacy czarina, White House confidante Karen Hughes," writes William Fisher, who has worked for USAID and the U.S. State Department. "These programs are intended to play a central role in boosting Bush's efforts to foster democracy and freedom in Iraq and throughout the broader Middle East."

"We were biased, all right - in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden," veteran journalist Bill Moyers told Broadcasting & Cable. In an interview with the trade publication, Moyers responds to accusations by the now chastened Kenneth Tomlinson, the controversial former head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting who has close ties to the White House, that he is the "exemplar of liberal PBS bias." Moyers added, "If reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted. It is an old canard of right-wing ideologues like Tomlinson to equate tough journalism with liberalism. They hope to distract people from the message by trying to discredit the messenger."

"Do a Google search on 'Cyber Monday,' and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago to describe the jump in online shopping activity following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday," Business Week Online reports. Cyber Monday is the creation of Shop.org, an online retailers trade association. The group's November 21 press release pitched Cyber Monday as "quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year." The reality, however, is that the Monday after Thanksgiving is only the "12th-biggest day historically," according to market researcher comScore Networks. "What's more, most e-tailers say the season's top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15," Business Week Online writes.

The Cinema and Media Studies Department at Carleton College in Minnesota has created a website, CameraIraq.com, which gathers news and commentary about public and personal photographic image practices associated with the "war of images in the Middle East." Items in their collection include photos of the dead bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons, the beheading of Nick Berg, the Bush "Mission Accomplished" photo op, and a variety of real and faked images depicting human rights abuses, atrocities and other staples of wartime propaganda.

The Pentagon's Joint Advertising, Market Research & Studies project has "finely sliced and diced its data enough to determine that the U.S. Army's prospective recruits come from households likely to listen to Spanish radio," while "the reading list at the households of U.S. Marine Corps prospects includes Car Craft, Guns and Ammo and Outdoor Life." Good U.S. Air Force prospects "listen to Nascar on the radio," while U.S. Navy enthusiasts "expect to get married within the next year." To "navigate a fragmented media environment," the Defense Department analyzed military applicants from 2000 to 2004, and identified 18 demographic groups "that provide the highest rate of prospective recruits." These include "Beltway Boomers," "Blue Chip Blues," "Young & Rustic," and "Multiculti Mosaic," as defined by Claritas, a "marketing information resources company." To reach these groups, "direct, interactive and other one-to-one marketing tactics," including email, are used; the Navy is "exploring emerging media such as cellphones and text messaging."

Professor Andrew Herx-heimer, emeritus fellow at the UK Cochrane Centre, told the British Medical Journal that changes to the British drug industry's voluntary code of practice were minimal. "This is very competent window dressing but not much has changed at all," he said. The drug industry's revised code followed the House of Commons health select committee's report, The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry, which found numerous flaws in the system of self-regulation. While the new code introduces new restrictions aimed at limiting the extent of drug company hospitality - including luxury accommodation and first class flights - doctors have criticized the limited sanctions for breaches. "The key weakness is that this is regulated by the industry, and so it is written in such a way that it doesn't seriously inconvenience companies if anything goes wrong," said Ike Iheanacho, the editor of the Drugs and Therapeutics Bulletin.

"About a dozen antiwar protesters, including Daniel Ellsberg and the sister of Cindy Sheehan, were arrested Wednesday morning while camping on a roadside near President Bush's ranch" in Crawford, Texas, reports Rosalind S. Helderman. The activists ran afoul of a new county law that was passed following this summer's protests to prohibit parking and camping on public lands near Bush's property. "The ordinance was very plainly meant to prevent people from protesting in front of Bush's ranch," said Dave Jensen, a former Marine and a protester who witnessed the arrests. "We feel that's a First Amendment issue. It's intentionally designed to curtail freedom of speech and freedom of assembly."

Public relations mogul Richard Edelman has some thoughts about the future of PR on his weblog. New technologies and consumer habits, he says, are reflected in changing media: Newspaper circulation figures and advertising revenues are dropping, and "every dollar coming out of print advertising revenue for newspapers is replaced by only 33 cents online." The rise of video-on-demand and digital video recording is enabling more and more TV viewers to skip ads. "For public relations professionals, these profound changes in media are both a challenge and opportunity," Edelman says. Among his suggestions for PR pros: "Recognize the influence and credibility of blogs" and attach video clips to "press materials to make it easier for bloggers in consumer technology to create v-blogs." It sounds like video news releases, largely the province until now of traditional television, are preparing to invade the blogosphere.

Ted Koppel, who recently stepped down from Nightline, his long-running TV news show, "was a fine journalist and a decent man," writes Fred Branfman, "but to stay atop journalism's establishment, even he had to make a deal with the devil." Branfman recalls his own experiences with Koppel during the war in Indochina, praising his "charisma, good humor and an unusual mix of professionalism and human decency." At Nightline, however, he became "a card-carrying member of the journalistic establishment. ... And that is the point. The issue isn't Ted himself but what he symbolizes: the institutional and structural corruption of an American media that has chosen to define 'news' primarily as the information it receives from American officials, and which has traded a critical and independent stance for 'access' to powerful figures. As long as the TV lead and Page One stories primarily come, directly or indirectly, from government officials, and as long as critics and dissenting information are ignored or relegated to page A18, Ted Koppel will be the best we get."

Kenneth Tomlinson, the former head of the U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting who recently resigned in the wake of a damning ethics investigation, is facing further harsh scrutiny. "Tomlinson is also under investigation by the State Department Inspector General’s Office for what he’s done as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors," reports Geneva Collins. "Meanwhile, two other agencies overseen by the BBG are embroiled in controversies both public and private. The fledgling Arab-language TV channel Alhurra is the subject of three separate government investigations (by the State Department, a House International Relations subcommittee and the Government Accountability Office). And journalists at Voice of America are assailing their BBG-appointed boss for trying to tilt news stories more favorably toward the Bush administration."

Staffing cuts and declining circulation are hitting leading newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune. "If newspapers take the shortsighted, short-term approach to tighter budgets by whittling away at investigative reporting, others outside the industry - such as blogs and radio - likely will take up the slack, and newspapers' decline will accelerate," writes Editor and Publisher editor Steve Outing. Newsrooms "have become the morgues they so closely resemble, filled with ghosts of the departed and those who await the next ax to fall," writes Kathleen Parker. "But to those in the trenches, cutting staff is exactly the wrong solution, more like a self-inflicted wound trending toward suicide than a remedy. By cutting newsroom staffs, the corporate suits are reducing the likelihood that papers can do what makes them necessary."

The British Government has warned media outlets against publishing further details of a leaked memo of an April 16, 2004 meeting at which George W. Bush allegedly told Tony Blair he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar. The Mirror quoted an anonymous source who stated that Bush "made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem." At the time US forces were attacking the Iraqi town of Fallujah. "The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over U.S. claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors," The Mirror reported. Following the original report, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith warned news outlets that publication of any further details from the memo would be treated as a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

In Denver, Sacramento, Atlanta and Cleveland, radio stations owned by the Gannett media conglomerate have adopted "advertainment" - a new programming format that consists of "hybrid shows, which mix entertainment with commercial content (in addition to regular commercial breaks)." In Minneapolis, Gannett affiliate KARE plans this spring to "revamp its chatty mid-morning talk show 'Today,' and put much of that happy talk up for sale," writes Deborah Caulfield Rybak. "Advertisers will pay $2,000 to $2,500 for 5-minute segments on the show. ... 'I am aghast,' said University of Minnesota media ethics professor Jane Kirtley, who at first thought a reporter was kidding about the new format. 'This is the logical extension of the whole pernicious practice of infomercials. If viewers are accustomed to getting [talk show] programming in a very different way, to suddenly change the rules on them isn't fair.'"

Technologically, the news media are vastly more advanced than it was during the Vietnam war, but commercial and political factors have "kept the war in Iraq marginal in the American media," write Rebecca Dana and Lizzy Ratner. A study done during the Vietnam war found that CBS devoted 91 minutes per month to reporting on Vietnam, whereas U.S. networks this year gave Iraq only 55 minutes per month. Other gaps in reporting include the following:

• "Dead troops are invisible. ... Over a six-month span, a set of leading United States newspapers and magazines ran 'almost no pictures' of Americans killed in action, and they ran only 44 photos of wounded Westerners."
• "Major newspapers have cut back on the size of their Baghdad bureaus, with some closing them or allowing them to go unstaffed for stretches."
• "Government regulation has spread over the battlefield, limiting mobility and access. Where Vietnam correspondents could hop a chopper to combat zones at will, Iraq reporters need to sign eight-page sheaves of rules and are pinned to single units."
• "Corporate security restrictions likewise stifle reporting. At CNN, reporters need clearance from the bureau chief to leave the network compound; similar rules apply at other networks."

Brussels, home to the European Commission, has also become home to "over 15,000 lobbyists (more than one for every European Commission official) but just 10 per cent of these represent environmental and social groups," according to a recently-released report. "A massive industry of corporate lobbying has grown up in Brussels with overwhelming influence on European trade policy. Yet the relationship between the European Commission and the corporate lobby is almost entirely unregulated, unaccountable and conducted behind closed doors," says Dave Timms of the UK-based World Development Movement, one of the groups that produced the report.

The Hill & Knowlton PR firm reportedly used scaremongering tactics to kill legislation before the European Parliament that would have banned fluorinated gases ("f-gases"), which contribute to global warming. "It's been six months of intense lobbying," said Avril Doyle, a parliamentarian who supported the regulation. "It was email, writing, phoning and faxing, non stop." She added that MEPs received letters "threatening them with job losses if they voted for this amendment or they voted for that directive." Greenpeace reports that the most vocal lobbying on F-gas regulation has come from the "European Partnership for Energy and the Environment" (EPEE). In fact, EPEE is neither European nor for the environment. "It's actually an industry front group," states the Greenpeace report, "made up largely of American and Japanese multinationals with plants in Europe, who are lobbying against regulation of F-gases out of cost concerns. And while their website makes a flashy show of how their chemicals don't destroy the ozone (which is true) they fail to mention that they're contributing to global warming. ... Ironically, Hill & Knowlton is exactly the same company which, in 1975, trotted out reports and scientists claiming that the Ozone hole was a myth, environmentalists were scare-mongering, and industry shouldn't be required to take costly and unnecessary action to ban CFCs."

The top U.S. commander in Iraq has submitted a plan to the Pentagon for withdrawing troops in Iraq, yet the call by Democratic Congressman John Murtha for troop withdrawal prompted a firestorm of attacks from Republicans, who called the decorated Vietnam veteran a "coward" and compared him to leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Murtha called the war "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion." He recalled the situation in Vietnam when White House officials said major military tasks would be over by the end of 1965. Instead, there were 2,263 American fatalities by the end of 1965, and more than 55,000 after that date. "I'm trying to prevent another Vietnam," Murtha said.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the National Latino Council on Alcohol and Tobacco Prevention, and Floridians for Youth Tobacco Education warn that the tobacco industry is increasingly targeting Latino children. Not only do Latino communities have relatively low smoking rates - making them "ripe for an industry seeking to boost sagging sales" - but Spanish-language marketing often "goes under the radar of the Federal Trade Commission." The advocacy groups pointed to R.J. Reynolds' "Kool be true" campaign, which recently ran an eight-page color ad in Latina magazine with pictures of musicians and the line, "It's about pursuing your ambitions and staying connected to your roots." The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids wants data to be collected on tobacco ads targeting different ethnicities. An RJR spokesperson called their cigarettes "multicultural," saying, "Do we want adult Hispanics to smoke our brand? Yeah. Just like we want African-Americans and whites to smoke our brands."

"The U.S. State Department has set up a rapid-response office dedicated to countering international news reports about the U.S. in the Middle East and the Muslim world that diverse from the ideas and values the Bush administration is seeking to export." The office, under PR czar Karen Hughes, "monitors global news stories and distributes a one-page report each morning to administration officials and policy makers in Washington." Hughes is also expanding the State Department's speaker's bureau and encouraging ambassadors and public affairs officers "to become more vocal on major issues and do more speeches and TV interviews." "Regional Arab speakers" are being recruited, "to speak on behalf of U.S. interests on the Al-Jazeera TV network," an outlet previously shunned by the Bush administration. Lastly, the department's new technology initiative uses "web chats, streaming video, and text messaging to amplify the government's message and make it relevant to younger audiences."

The economy is booming in the Arab emirate of Dubai, and so is the public relations industry. "Someone recently remarked that anyone who could rent a space at Dubai Media City was opening a PR agency," jokes John Badenhorst, director-in-charge at Landmark PR & Events. But according to Tim Burrowes, editor of Dubai-based Campaign Middle East (a weekly newspaper for the advertising and media industries), "The major problem for the PR industry is that there are a lot of crooks and charlatans operating here – and standards are often woeful."

"CBS affiliate WUSA-TV was charging the [Washington] DC government as much as $100,000 annually to promote breast cancer awareness during newscasts." From 2002 to 2004, anchors at the Gannett-owned station were required to encourage viewers to go to the station's website for information about breast cancer - next to a banner ad for the city's Human Services Department. Through their "Buddy Check 9" program, the TV station also encouraged viewers to remind women friends or family members to perform self-exams for breast cancer. The city's contracts with the station, obtained by The Washington Times, specify payments were for "on-air mentions ... of the Buddy Check 9 program" and of the station's website, "for the Department of Human Services' banner." The station's manager said, "We did not sell news time," but the chair of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee said the "line between what's news coverage and what's paid advertising" needs to be "fairly distinct."

"DuPont Co. hid studies showing the risks of a Teflon-related chemical used to line candy wrappers, pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags and hundreds of other food containers," according to a former employee and leaked company documents. The chemical, Zonyl, degrades into perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the safety of which is debated by the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. The leaked documents describe "laboratory tests showing [Zonyl] came off paper coating and leached into foods at levels three times higher than the FDA limit set in 1967." Another test showed rats and dogs fed Zonyl for three months "had anemia and damage to their kidneys and livers." The EPA has accused DuPont of repeatedly failing "over a 20-year period to submit required data about PFOA," and will hold a hearing on the issue this month. DuPont settled one PFOA contamination class-action lawsuit for $107.6 million but faces another.

“It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how (the Iraq) war began,” Bush scolded his critics in his Veterans Day speech on November 11. But as Robert Parry observes, Bush is the one doing the rewriting. "Bush’s argument is that he didn’t lie the nation into war; he and his top aides were just misled by the same faulty intelligence that Congress saw," he writes. In reality, however, "the White House sees far more detailed intelligence than what is shared with Congress." Parry adds that "perhaps the strongest evidence of Bush’s proclivity to lie about Iraq came after the invasion, when he began falsifying the record – rewriting history – with claims that Saddam Hussein had barred U.N. weapons inspectors from entering Iraq. ... The significance of this provable lie to the other Iraq War falsehoods is that it demonstrates Bush’s intent to deceive."

"The internet has added a whole new dimension and level of artistic sophistication to anti-war and anti-imperialist art and propaganda during the Iraq war and surrounding events," writes Kari Lydersen. On websites such as PeacePosters.org, MiniatureGigantic.com, AnotherPosterForPeace.com and OverMyDeadBody.org, "graphic designers and grassroots propagandists from far-flung corners of the globe (though most heavily concentrated in Europe and the US) have posted their work on web sites and circulated it by email in the hopes that others will reproduce and display it freely."

While the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence drags its feet on discovering how the White House sold the Iraq war, journalist James Bamford has written a major expose on one of the key players: John Rendon. In his Rolling Stone story "The Man Who Sold the War," Bamford traces the development of Rendon and his firm The Rendon Group (TRG) from Democratic Party organizer to Kuwaiti liberator to secretive Pentagon propagandist-for-hire. In a rare interview, Rendon "boasted openly" to Bamford of "the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy." One example of TRG's work is the story of Iraqi exile Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed Saddam Hussein had tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The fact that al-Haideri failed CIA polygraph tests didn't stop TRG from giving Judith Miller the print exclusive interview. "Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide," Bamford writes.

"It took the public tailspin of Tom Cruise's reputation to put the importance of the celebrity PR pro into the spotlight," reports Julia Hood. "Cruise put his sister in the job vacated by the legendary Pat Kingsley. The impact of subsequent PR gaffes was instantaneous, as Cruise became a laughingstock for jumping on sofas on Oprah and taking Brooke Shields to task for postpartum-depression medicating. ... Cruise has always seemed a bit high-strung and certainly litigious with certain media outlets, but the more extreme aspects of his personality were smoothed out for public consumption under the guidance of Kingsley. Now that Cruise has turned to Rogers & Cowan, he has presumably realized that celebrity PR should be handled by the pros."

Constantin Basurea has compiled a list of blogs that focus on public relations. Most of them are pro-PR and written by public relations practitioners, but the Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch.org is also listed, along with the Europe-based SpinWatch.org.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting's (CPB) Inspector-General, Kenneth A. Konz, found former CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson "violated statutory provisions and the Director’s Code of Ethics" in negotiations over the creation of a program hosted by Paul Gigot, the conservative editor of the Wall Street Journal opinion page. Konz also found that Tomlinson hired Fred Mann, a 20 year veteran of the conservative National Journalism Center, to assess "NOW with Bill Moyers" and other programs, "without informing the Board or without Board authorization" and that his hiring of ML Strategies and the Alexander Strategy Group to advise on lobbying strategy on a budget bill "was not handled in accordance with CPB’s contracting procedures." Tomlinson resigned before the report was publicly released. In a fiery response, included as an appendix to the report, Tomlinson complained the findings would "only help to maintain the status quo and other reformers will be discouraged from seeking change."

As "part of a cultural shift that increasingly sees health problems as lifestyles rather than diseases," food marketers are targeting the chronically ill "as the new much-reach demographic." Groceries have "heart healthy" sections because there are more than 70 million U.S. residents with heart problems, representing "$71 billion in annual buying power." The nation's 21 million diabetics "command about $14 billion" and "about two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese," writes the Associated Press. The Chicago marketing research firm IRI Healthcare recently reported on "the disease-marketing trend." IRI's Bob Doyle says the impact is even wider: "If Mom comes down with something, the entire household's diet changes."

"This intrusive process is getting more and more out of hand," said the president of the Writers Guild of America West, referring to product placements, commercial messages written into movies and television shows. The Writers and Screen Actors Guilds "complain placement practices hurt their artistic integrity and that they aren't paid for helping to sell the products." The two groups "say they want to negotiate a code of conduct that includes disclosure at the beginning of each movie and TV program of the advertising that has been woven into the script. They also want the studios to put limits on the use of such advertising in children's programming." And if network and studio heads won't negotiate, the guilds say they will take the matter to the Federal Communications Commission. The Writers Guild estimates that product placements increased by 44 percent last year, representing more than $1 billion in revenue.

Not all of Wal-Mart's overseas factories are in China. The government of Bangladesh recently signed a six-month, $330,000 contract with Ketchum's The Washington Group, to "open doors at the senior levels of major U.S. corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, Lockheed Martin and Wal-Mart to interest them in projects of importance to the People's Republic of Bangladesh." Former U.S. Congresswoman Susan Molinari, who heads the account, said her goal is to "dispel misconceptions about alleged human rights abuses, corrupt government practices and Islamist militancy." In addition to business relations, Ketchum will work to promote military-to-military collaboration, debt relief and a U.S. visit by Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. The firm is hoping that Zia will address a joint session of Congress, "a rare honor, which in turn would stimulate high visibility media opportunities."

"It seems strange, in our day of multiple 24-7 news channels, the always-on Internet, and RSS to say that we don’t have enough news," writes Lisa Williams. "But in most cities and towns that happen to be more than 500 feet outside a major media market, the local people suffer more from media anorexia than information overload. It’s hard to find good information about the place where you live." Williams describes her own experiences trying to fill the gap with H2Otown, her citizen journalism website for Watertown, Massachusetts. Citizen journalism, she writes, takes real work and a different funding model than traditional newspapers: "It seemed to me that a successful newsblog might have a business model that looked more like public radio – periodic pledge drives and underwriters – than the subscription/advertising model that many news outlets were dragging into the online world. To make it work, they’d have to get over something I suspected they and many journalists had: hesitation about being directly involved with handling the money."

With so many television and film producers churning out reality TV shows and big budget action movies, there often seems to be little space on the screen for relevant, critical documentaries. The films produced by the Media Education Foundation, however, are just that. MEF produced pieces tell the missing story on media and culture in America, including a documentary version of the Center's groundbreaking book Toxic Sludge Is Good For You. Until the end of this year, MEF is offering many of its films - such as Game Over: Gender, Race & Violence in Video Games; Speak Up! Improving the Lives of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgendered Youth; and Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women - to individuals for a special reduced price. Visit MEF's website for more information.

The PR firm Edelman "is working with the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry's primary lobbying group, on a public issues campaign aimed at convincing Americans that the industry is facing severe challenges, even as its members pull in record quarterly profits," reports PR Week. Print ads designed by Edelman's advertising unit, Blue Worldwide, "have run in major daily newspapers across the nation, as well as in Roll Call and The Hill." The print ads urge "consumers to adopt conservation measures this winter" and push for the removal of "barriers on the production of natural gas on federal lands." Blue Worldwide also launched "a new TV campaign that will run during news and public affairs programming, which started with NBC Nightly News" on November 10.

West Virginia's Pharmaceutical Cost Management Council unanimously approved "a financial disclosure form that would require pharmaceutical companies to reveal how much they spend on advertising and promotion of brand-name drugs" in the state, as well as any "gifts, grants or payments to physicians" in excess of $25. A legislative rules committee considers the form and related rule changes next, though they will likely "be challenged in court by the pharmaceutical industry." An attorney with the industry group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) said the proposal "is much more extreme, we think, than is authorized by statute." To back up its critique, PhRMA presented "a four-page analysis from the Washington law firm Covington and Burling." A PhRMA state lobbyist also argued that such information should be "used internally by the council ... and not be accessible, say, to attorneys doing litigation against a company." West Virginia's AARP supports the measure.

"Time heals a lot of marketing wounds," said the director of the University of Southern California's Sports Business Institute. In June 2003, basketball star Kobe Bryant signed a four-year, $45 million endorsement deal with shoe company Nike. Weeks later, Bryant was accused of sexual assault. Now that the criminal case has been dismissed and a related civil lawsuit settled, "Nike and Mr. Bryant are slowly relaunching the star's career as a product endorser." But even while Bryant's legal problems abounded, Nike had "an under-the-radar campaign intended to keep the star's cachet high among shoe collectors and other taste makers." That included limited releases of shoes "customized for Mr. Bryant that landed in upscale sneaker boutiques," raffles of shoes with Bryant's signature, and others with his personal logo, a "dagger-like etching." While "traditional consumer-product companies" are staying away from Bryant, Nike "recently rolled out its first Kobe print campaign."

The American Chemistry Council (ACC), which recently launched a major chemical industry PR campaign called "essential2," is one of the main groups claiming that the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a public right-to-know program, is not so essential. Under TRI, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency annually reports on what industries release into the air, water and land. The ACC "has urged less frequent reporting since 1999." ACC's Michael Walls said, "Just because we're used to doing something doesn't mean we should accept the inherent high costs or burden of doing it." The Bush administration supports changing the TRI so that fewer releases are reported, less frequently. EPA officials say they will "likely spend another year weighing the pros and cons" of the proposed changes, after the public comment period ends on December 5. According to federal records, the EPA "previously solicited comments from industry groups."

In its latest quarterly financial report, Medialink Worldwide, the world's biggest producer of video news releases (VNRs), has revealed that its losses are growing. In the three months to the end of September, the company had a loss of $1.3 million from continuing operations, compared to $596,000 for the same period in 2004. Medialink's Media Communications Services unit - which is responsible for products such as VNRs, audio news releases, B-roll and Satellite Media Tours - suffered a 6.9 percent drop in income, largely as the "result of a significant decline in business from a major customer." The company notes that changes in government regulations imposed "on the company or on the news media could have the effect of reducing the effectiveness of our services." On the teleconference for investors, Medialink's CEO, Larry Moskowitz, made no direct mention of the controversy over fake news.

"A humbler Microsoft" is "reinventing itself," writes Advertising Age. "It is enlisting young executives ... in a marketing-leadership program to help it overcome hurdles such as competition from free software; the challenge of competing against itself with new products; and getting consumers to trust the company once blames for security breaches." Microsoft's chief marketing officer, Mitch Mathews, was elevated so that he reports directly to CEO Steve Ballmer. Microsoft also created a new organization, Marketing@Microsoft, with a training program offering "peer and career mentors" that draws 70 to 80 recent graduates a year. Each year, "the top students get treated to a lunch with Mr. Ballmer." Lastly, Microsoft has begun conducting "consumer research before programmers hit the keyboards."

As The Nation's Jeremy Scahill cautions that Stewart Simonson, the U.S. official "responsible for coordinating the federal response to a flu pandemic or bioterror attack could well be the next Michael Brown," businesses are preparing marketing plans to avoid decreased chicken or egg consumption due to avian flu. The PR firm Edelman "is in the early stages of developing contingency programs." Edelman's Mike Seymour said, "We're building on our experience with SARS. ... The best thing to do is to have a plan in place ahead of it." Kentucky Fried Chicken is planning TV ads "to educate consumers that eating cooked chicken is perfectly safe." The National Chicken Council launched a website, avianinfluenzainfo.com. Perdue Farms and Tyson Foods "have prepared press releases ... trying to allay concerns." O'Dwyer's reports that the Egg Safety Center hired Aronow Communications "to get word out that a potential avian flu pandemic would not make eggs unsafe."

"Top White House officials say they're developing a 'campaign-style' strategy in response to increasing Democratic allegations that the Bush administration twisted intelligence to make its case for war," reports Dana Bash. Speaking on condition of anonymity, White House officials outlined a strategy that "has not yet become public and will play out over several weeks through presidential speeches, close coordination with Republicans on Capitol Hill and a stepped-up effort by the Republican National Committee." Liz Barrett at CJR Daily finds it noteworthy that the administration is telegraphing its strategy to reporters who are dutifully writing it down. Put another way, she says, this amounts to saying, "I, along with my colleagues in the press, have been used in the past to preview assorted White House public relations plans and talking points. And I'm told -- and I'm telling you -- that I and my colleagues in the press will be similarly used in the near future."

The global mining giant Rio Tinto is lobbying the Australian government to amend draft legislation to ensure individual common law agreements with its workers override collectively bargained labor awards and certified agreements. The Australian Financial Review reports this would effectively close "the door on legal strikes." In a submission to the Senate committee reviewing the draconian proposals, Rio Tinto argues that collective workplace agreements are "inconsistent with a culture of working together." This is inconsistent with Rio Tinto's membership in the United Nations' Global Compact, which directs companies to "uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining." However, the UN compact has no compliance or enforcement provisions. Still, the UN claims the compact's ten principles in corporate social responsibility encourage "good practices by participants."

William Greider meditates on the multiple scandals now roiling Washington, comparing the situation to prerevolution France. Traditional broadcast media, he observes, are among the institutions whose credibility is rapidly disppearing: "Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable 'news' and over-intimate attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king's twisted version of reality and his lust for war. The institutions of 'news' failed democracy on monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like the ancien régime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from people and ordinary experience."

In a scathing column, journalist Neil Shoebridge wrote that if marketers "knew how hard some [PR] firms work to pump up the billable hours they charge back to their clients ... they would fire them and sue to get their money back." In response the national president of the Public Relations Institute of Australia, Annabelle Warren, argued that the such practices would be in breach the ethics code. "Media relations requires consultants with strong experience and high level skills. Good marketers know that handling the media needs specialist public relations practitioners," she wrote. It is an argument that is unlikely to persuade Shoebridge, who suggested in his original column that PR firms are hired "because the PR industry has convinced the business world that dealing with the media is hard work. It is not: it requires honesty and responsiveness, qualities that are in short supply at most PR firms."

"Fleishman-Hillard is counseling Roche, which now says it is doing everything possible to meet the demand for Tamiflu, according to Michael Rinaldo, head of F-H's health group in New York," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "Roche says it is 'doing everything possible' to meet demand for flu drug." The company's reputation took a hit last month when it appeared to be "more eager to protect its 'monopoly' on its Tamiflu - the vaccine most effective in fighting bird flu - than preventing a worldwide avian flu pandemic," O'Dwyer's writes.

"One thing that is really starting to bother me is the growing tendency to see news photos from Iraq which have been taken by the American military," writes Michael Shaw, whose website BAGnewsNotes.com analyzes news photos. Shaw points out two recent photos of military operations in Iraq used by the Los Angeles Times. "With the exception of a paper like the [New York Times], however, which can afford to hire stringers or underwrite photojournalists, it seems that the military has been all too willing to fill in the visual shortfall itself," Shaw writes. A reader comments on Shaw's post, "The problem is that [corporate media] don't choose to [hire photojournalists] because it doesn't sell soap powder. As a country the US is very inward focussed. ... The LA Times doesn't have to use those propaganda photos supplied by the Pentagon. They chose to."

Ahmed Chalabi was once dubbed the "George Washington of Iraq" by neoconservatives, as his Iraqi National Congress provided much of the false intelligence information that led the United States into war. More recently, he has been accused of acting as a double agent for Iran and has denounced the U.S. Now he's back in Washington in an official visit as Iraq's deputy prime minister. His visit poses a dilemma for the Bush administration, which is meeting with Chalabi but also distancing itself from his past. "Think of him as a former football player - that was all then. That's what he did in his other life," said a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity (and without indicating which team he's playing for now).

"Halliburton, one of the most politically charged and controversial corporate brands in the world, has a new head of communications," reports PR Week. Wendy Hall, the company's former director of communications, resigned in April. Her replacement is Cathy Mann, a graduate of Texas A&M University who has worked at Halliburton and its subsidiary, Brown & Root, since 1992.

Mars Inc., the candy company that makes Snickers bars, M&Ms and Dove chocolates, used to spend $1 million per year subsidizing a newsletter which claimed that eating chocolate could prevent cavities. Now it is funding research that says chocolate is good for your heart. According to PR Week, the company has hired the Weber Shandwick PR firm to help promote its new CocoaVia brand, with the slogan, "Be Good to Your Heart Everyday." The New York Times reports that Mars is even placing its new CocoaVia bars in the health food aisles, near nutrition bars rather than candy, in retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target. Noting that the new chocolate bars are still high in fat and calories, independent nutritionists remain skeptical, "saying that the effort seems less of a breakthrough than a sly way to scare up chocolate sales."

Walter Carl, a communications professor and advisor to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), has a weblog where he follows the scuttlebutt and media coverage relating to buzz and guerrilla marketing. Recent items include a link to last year's 60 Minutes segment on "Undercover Marketing," a piece by Seth Stevenson about a sneaky marketing campaign for Burger King, and a Boston Globe article about buzz marketing on college campuses.

With the passage of the California Safe Cosmetics Act of 2005, cosmetics companies will have to tell California state health officials about the ingredients in their products that might cause cancer. It would seem that the American Cancer Society would be a natural supporter of this kind of legislation, but grassroots cancer-prevention organizers found this not to be the case. "The bill’s proponents said that one of the new law’s biggest obstacles was the silence of the ACS, the most powerful cancer-research and cancer-lobbying organization in the world. The ACS is now the second-largest charity in the world, with a net worth of over $1 billion and an average $1 billion in annual revenue,"