Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a front group for the coal industry, is "sending 30 Santas to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to deliver stockings filled with coal-shaped chocolate," reports The Hill. "The goal of the campaign is to shift coal's image as a key contributor to global warming to a relatively cheap and increasingly clean provider of electricity." David Roberts predicts that "This is only the beginning of what promises to be an enormous PR campaign by an industry that sees the writing on the wall. In public, it will be smiles and Santas. Behind the scenes, it will be slime campaigns against candidates who dare propose a shift to renewable energy."

Fineman PR of San Francisco, California, has released their list of top ten PR blunders of 2007. Topping the list at number one is "No Reporters? No Problem" -- the fake news conference staged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) about their response to the California wild fires. (FEMA also merited a Dishonorable Mention in CMD's 2007 Falsies Awards.) Coming in second was a poorly conceived guerrilla marketing campaign. "When Boston residents suddenly noted blinking, cryptic devices attached to bridges, bus depots and subway stations, they alerted city authorities, who shut down sections of the city to remove the devices and ensure that they were not related to a bomb threat or other terrorist activity." The culprit? The Turner Broadcasting-affiliated Cartoon Network, advertising their program "Aqua Teen Hunger Force."

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 military march on YouTube, Gitmo's not so anonymous defenders, and what the Lincoln Group has been up to in Iraq. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we tell you how baby bottles and Happy Meals are connected. 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 latest email bulletin from the USC Center on Public Diplomacy called our attention to a list that someone has compiled of the "Top 10 Propaganda Videos." Viewing the list in chronological order is like taking a trip through the social obsessions of yesteryear: a clip from Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 pro-Nazi film, "Triumph of the Will"; a 1943 anti-Nazi cartoon by The Walt Disney Company, and a pro-tax film from the same year featuring Donald Duck; a Communist propaganda film from Moscow in the 1940s; American anti-Communist and anti-homosexual films from the 1950s; anti-porn and anti-LSD films from the 1960s; an anti-software piracy film from the 1990s; and a recent anti-American film that denounces the war in Iraq and the Project for the New American Century.

In late November the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers announced the results of a survey of 353 East African corporate executives for its "Most Respected Company" award for 2007. The winner was the Kenyan mobile phone company, Safaricom. One of Safaricom's claims to fame is that it boasts the highest profits of any company in the region. Betty Caplan, who recounts her own unsatisfactory experience with the company's customer service, is less than impressed. "Could the highest profits in the region -- and amongst the highest on the continent -- be the result of cutting costs on customer care, and spending a lot of our hard-earned money instead on hype? And don't give me that nonsense about Corporate Social Responsibility. What they spend is the equivalent of about 5 cents to you and me and done purely to improve their image, not out of any real desire to give back to the community," she wrote.