Two new opinion polls show deepening public dissatisfaction with U.S. politicians. According to a Reuters/Zogby poll, "The number of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track jumped four points to 66 percent. Bush's job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month's record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent. A paltry 11 percent gave Congress a positive grade, tying last month's record low." According to Zogby, voter attitudes are hardening into a "throw the bums out" mindset that could present problems for Democrats and Republicans alike in next year's elections. Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll finds that most Americans think the situation in Iraq is getting worse, and 60% now think it was a mistake to invade: "This is within 2 percentage points of being the highest on record; 62% of Americans said the war was a mistake in July 2007." Gallup's tracking finds Bush's approval rating slightly higher than the Zogby result at 32%, but still near his all-time low.

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we cover the Turkish government's attempts to lobby away the Armenian genocide, dueling conflicts of interest over lung cancer scans, and the media companies made to pay for airing payola pundit Armstrong Williams. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we tell you how many steps it takes to get from the flacks behind the first Gulf War to the flacks for the country threatening to invade northern Iraq today. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!

The executive editor and CEO of Village Voice Media were arrested Thursday night after publishing details of what they call "breathtaking abuse of the constitution" in a grand jury subpoena against their Arizona newspaper, the New Times. The subpoena is part of an attempt to prosecute the paper for publishing articles criticizing Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio's questionable real estate deals. The subpoena demands that the paper turn over "all documents related to articles and other content published by Phoenix New Times newspaper in print and on the Phoenix New Times website, regarding Sheriff Joe Arpaio from January 1, 2004 to the present." In addition, it demands information about all the online readers of the publication, including their Internet domain names and what other Web sites they visited before reading New Times. According to retired judge Kenneth Fields, the subpoena "touches on privacy issues of a lot of people who cannot be the subject of a grand-jury investigation. This is potentially thousands of people." Village Voice reporter Tony Ortega says the arrests show that Arpaio, who has carefully cultivated a "constant parade of television journalists" to build an image as "America's toughest sheriff," is actually a "paranoid despot ... Even those reporters who may have bought Arpaio's line of bull in the past must see what an abuse of power this is, and how it threatens the journalism being done by papers that dare to question public officials."

The New York Times today published an op-ed piece blasting research that tests the comparative effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. The piece failed to mention that its author, Peter Pitts, is a senior vice president at the PR firm of Manning, Selvage and Lee. Pitts has a history of flacking as an attack dog for the pharmaceutical industry and currently heads a pharma front group called the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. Physician Roy M. Poses of the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine has written a critique of the "slippery slope" rhetoric in Pitts' editorial. "It is disappointing that a newspaper as influential as the New York Times would publish a health policy article without disclosing all the author's relevant financial interests, particularly one so relevant and direct," Poses adds. "Fostering more stealth health policy advocacy in ever more influential venues will just make the already confusing clamor about health care and its reform even muddier."