In Acme Township, Michigan, the Meijer retail giant "secretly funded a plan to orchestrate last February's recall of Acme Township's elected officials, a potential violation of state campaign finance laws," reports Brian McGillivary. "Meijer paid a public relations firm at least $30,000 in a failed effort to remove Acme's board after years of zoning disputes over Meijer's plans to build a store along M-72 in Grand Traverse County. Meijer's public relations firm crafted recall language, devised election strategy, wrote campaign literature, and used local residents as figureheads in the recall." The PR firm, Seyferth, Spaulding, Tennyson Inc. of Grand Rapids, directed the campaign using front groups including Acme Taxpayers for Responsible Government and the Acme Recall Committee. "It gives me a chill, how much money they can spend to ruin other people," said Acme Clerk Dorothy Dunville, one of the public officials targeted by the company's recall campaign. T. Michael Jackson, a retired public relations professional, has filed a complaint with the Public Relations Society of America, charging that Seyferth, Spaulding, Tennyson violated the PRSA's code of ethics.

"Top editors at the military newspaper Stars and Stripes are asking for full disclosure of the paper's relationship with a Department of Defense publicity program, called America Supports You, after disclosures that money for the program was funneled through the newspaper," reports Sara Abruzzesse. "The newspaper's two top editors have asked that the acting publisher, Max D. Lederer Jr., and the Pentagon official who oversees the program, Allison Barber, release details of a relationship that involves employees of the newspaper's business department overseeing contracts on behalf of America Supports You." The editors complain that the paper's business deals with a DoD PR program undermine its editorial independence and credibility. What might be the motivation for funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars through the paper? "Because Stars and Stripes relies partly on advertising revenue, it operates with fewer guidelines and restrictions than other Pentagon programs."

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, recalls former Dateline NBC correspondent John Hockenberry, the network diverted him from reporting on al Qaeda and instead wanted him to come up with a version of "the show Cops, only with firefighters." During the invasion of Iraq, a network exec axed a segment featuring "a reporter in Baghdad who was experiencing the bombing firsthand" on grounds that it conveyed "a point of view." Hockenberry sees these stories as lessons about how television news "lost its most basic journalistic instincts" in pursuit of stories that "reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone's lost kitty." He also criticizes conflicts of interest as "NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor." As another example of the conflict between news and General Electric's business interests, he noted that GE does business with members of Osama Bin Laden's extended family. "In early 2002," he says, "our team was in Saudi Arabia covering regional reaction to September 11." However, GE turned him down when he asked for help contacting the Bin Ladens so he could interview them about their estranged family member.

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 look at how Wal-Mart is moving supposedly outside support in-house, the work of a government agency charged with protecting consumers, and how they aren't, and 2007 journalism that really reeks. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we tell you how drugs and rock n' roll connect Rudy Giuliani and George Bush. 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 New York Times reports, "When a Saudi court sentenced a young woman to 200 lashes in November after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her, the case provoked outrage and headlines around the world, including in the Middle East. But not at Al Jazeera, the Arab world's leading satellite television channel, seen by 40 million people. ... For the past three months Al Jazeera, which once infuriated the Saudi royal family with its freewheeling newscasts, has treated the kingdom with kid gloves, media analysts say. The newly cautious tone appears to have been dictated to Al Jazeera's management by the rulers of Qatar, where Al Jazeera has its headquarters. ... The specter of Iran's nuclear ambitions may be particularly daunting to tiny Qatar, which also is the site of a major American military base. The new policy is the latest chapter in a gradual domestication of Al Jazeera, once reviled by American officials as little more than a terrorist propaganda outlet."

Two leading privacy rights organizations have put together a world map of surveillance societies, rating various nations for their civil liberties records. Both the U.S. and the UK are colored black for "endemic surveillance," as are Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, China and Malaysia. "The 2007 rankings indicate an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world, reflecting an increase in surveillance and a declining performance on privacy safeguards," reports Kim Zetter. Moreover, "The privacy trends have been fueled by the emergence of a profitable surveillance industry dominated by global IT companies and the creation of numerous international treaties that frequently operate outside judicial or democratic processes."