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 inconvenient research results on toxins, big coal spending to survive, and coconuts in the fuel tank. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at the Armstrong Williams: hardly a paragon of ethics, but still a go-to guy for commentary. 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!

Jarvik ad for Pfizer's Lipitor (source: Pharma Marketing Blog)Drug maker Pfizer yielded to pressure from a Congressional committee and pulled deceptive Lipitor ads featuring Dr. Robert Jarvik. In one of the ads, created by the Kaplan Thaler Group, Dr. Jarvik is shown apparently rowing a boat, but the rowing was in fact done by a stunt double. In the ads, Dr. Jarvik also claims to be a user of Lipitor, but he didn't actually start taking the medication until after he was hired by Pfizer to promote it. The House Committee was also concerned that the ads presented Dr. Jarvik as offering the public medical advice, when in reality he is not a medical doctor, but a medical engineer.

Virgin Atlantic has flown a jumbo jet from London to Amsterdam fueled by bio fuel derived from a mixture of Brazilian babassu nuts and coconuts. But is this really green progress, or just greenwashing? Virgin Atlantic's head, Richard Branson, called the flight a "vital breakthrough" for the airline industry. "This pioneering flight will enable those of us who are serious about reducing our carbon emissions to go on developing the fuels of the future." But environmentalists had a different take, calling it a "gimmick," and a publicity stunt. Dr Doug Parr of Greenpeace called it a "high-altitude greenwash," saying, "Instead of looking for a magic green bullet, Virgin should focus on the real solution to this problem and call for a halt to relentless airport expansion."

As CMD recently reported, a federal judge ordered the Wikleaks website shut down. The site allows whistleblowers to post documents anonymously. Lawyers for a dozen news and public interest organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union and Public Citizen, asked the judge to rescind his order. On February 29, Judge Jeffrey White reversed the ruling, reports the New York Times. The judge "acknowledged that the bank's request posed serious First Amendment questions and might constitute unjustified prior restraint." He also criticized the ability of online technology to evade legal jurisdiction, saying that "people can do some good things and people can do some terrible things without accountability." Thanks to the reversal, Wikileaks is again available via its U.S. web domain, Wikileaks.org.

David Roberts of Grist.org writes in the Nation, "So there you have it: just in the past week, elite opinion against coal has accelerated, two major coal projects have run into embarrassments, and an independent report has confirmed that things are only going to get worse." Power consulting firm Wood MacKensie says that "the rate of coal plant cancellations accelerated during 2007 to the point that more than 50% of the new coal capacity announced since 2000 has now been canceled." On top of that, the cost of building new power plants has increased 130% since the start of the decade. Desperation is palpable in industry's efforts in places like Kansas. After the Sunflower plant was denied a permit last year based on failure to meet air quality requirements, they leaned on their friends in the state legislature to pass a coal-friendly "compromise" bill. When Governor Kathleen Sebelius promised to veto the bill, Sunflower resorted to blatant bribery. The firm says they "will give $2.5 million over 10 years to Kansas State University ... but only if the plant is approved." But what about the promise of "clean coal"? Roberts states that "an official at Royal Dutch Shell said last week that carbon prices would have to reach about $100/tonne -- three times current levels -- before investment in carbon capture and storage would make economic sense."

The coal industry is on the ropes, but is working hard to ensure that regardless of who wins in the November elections, coal will come out on top. Funded by the coal industry, the front group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) is appealing directly to politicians, but also to the general public that will be voting. "We are out there talking to everybody, from people who are running for president of the United States down to Joe Six-pack," said Joe Lucas of ABEC. ABEC has run several TV ads, including the one above. Among ABEC's other expenditures is $5 million paid to CNN for advertising and co-sponsorship of at least six presidential debates. They are expected to lay out $40 million this year to further their cause -- double their 2007 budget. "With 59 coal power plants scrapped last year, the industry is fighting to make sure it can emerge from the climate change debate with a guaranteed spot in the nation's energy future." As CMD previously reported, ABEC was responsible for 30 santas delivering coal-shaped chocolate to members of Congress at the holidays. For more information on coal, visit the Coal Issues portal on SourceWatch.org.

Armstrong WilliamsWho better to turn to for a discussion of journalism ethics than "payola pundit" Armstrong Williams? On February 22, MSNBC Live asked Williams to comment on the New York Times article about presidential candidate and Senator John McCain's ties to a telecom lobbyist. "What it does more than anything else," Williams replied, "it causes those of us in the media to lose credibility. People begin to question what we print, whether there's any truth to it, whether we do our research." He left out one important question: what we're paid to promote. Williams was a subcontractor on a 2004 agreement between the U.S. Education Department and the PR firm Ketchum. He promoted the controversial "No Child Left Behind" legislation on television and radio, without disclosing that he was being paid to do so. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission cited Williams and proposed fines against Sinclair Broadcast Group and Sonshine Family Television, for airing the Williams segments.

As the debate over Canada's military mission in Afghanistan continues, the country's "Department of National Defence is ... spending millions of dollars sponsoring think tanks and scholars to offer up agreeable commentary," writes University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran. "Take the Conference of Defence Associations, a think tank that got $500,000 from DND last year. ... A current DND policy reads that to receive money, CDA must 'support activities that give evidence of contributing to Canada's national polices.'" CDA's annual conference featured "no opposition politicians," and its executive director said the DND "contract obliges it 'to write a number of op-eds to the press.'" DND also "sponsors policy scholars, who create the ideas, news and views that shape Canadians' perception of the military and the war. ... When DND needs a kind word in Parliament or the media -- presto! -- a [DND]-sponsored scholar often appears, without disclosing his or her financial link." Attaran calls for full disclosure and a system "to award [DND] grants on an arm's-length basis." He adds, "Canada needs fresh ideas -- not groupthink -- to win."

On SourceWatch, our online wiki about "the names behind the news," we try to encourage a referencing policy which ensures that every piece of information in each article can be verified by a link to an authoritative source for that information. However, sometimes these references get left out.

You can help improve SourceWatch goal by identifying articles that need better referencing and tagging them for further work. All it takes is a few minutes. Simply visit a random article (or a specific article of your choosing), read it over, and mark the places whether additional citations are needed by adding {{refimprove}} and {{fact}} tags. Please visit the special SourceWatch page on articles needing additional references for further instructions on how to do this. Have fun, and thanks for your help!

Ray Moynihan reveals that while educational events have been advertised to Australian medical practitioners as being independent, behind the scenes sponsoring drug companies were being offered the chance to nominate speakers and topics relating to their drugs. At the center of the controversy is Healthed, which describes itself as "one of Australia's most popular and respected providers of education for health professionals." In 2006 one drug company, CSL, agreed to a "platinum sponsorship" package costing $A18,000 for four seminars to help promote its pain relief drug, Tramal. In an email, CSL wrote to Healthed founder, Dr Ramesh Manocha, asking that he "determine the speaker's opinion re: Tramal as I would like to ensure he positions it appropriately." In response Manocha wrote that he would "reconfirm opinion of headache speaker regarding Tramal to ensure balanced presentation."

In 2005, the Army celebrated its 230th birthday with its NASCAR driverThe U.S. Air Force "wants to more than double its advertising budget ... to $112.5 million," reports the Air Force Times. Like the Army, which is increasingly targeting adult "influencers" in its attempts to get more young recruits, the Air Force wants to go beyond "the typical advertising to convince young adults to consider joining the service." With an increased ad budget, the Air Force would "explain" its mission "to a wider, and older, general public -- the folks who pay taxes, elect lawmakers and whose children join the service." Over a year, 220 million adults will each "see 30 Air Force advertisements, from ads on Web sites to full-page newspaper ads to prime-time television ads," according to the campaign plan. The campaign will educate "the American public on how today's Air Force is the most engaged, versatile and high-tech of all the military services," states the Air Force's budget proposal.

The February 2008 newsletter of the Obesity Society supports a new rule from the New York City's health commisssioner requiring restaurants to publish information about the number of calories in their food, but apparently the society's president, Dr. David B. Allison, hasn't gotten the word. The New York State Restaurant Association, which is suing to block the new rule, hired Allison to write an affidavit arguing against it, on grounds that if people know how many calories are in the food they eat, they actually might get fatter. The Center for Consumer Freedom, a notorious front group for the restaurant industry, has also thrown its weight against the rule, complaining that "the food cop campaign will plaster our nation's menus with warning labels."

Gawker.com, the media gossip blog, recently had a testy exchange with Richard Edelman, CEO of the giant Edelman public relations firm, after Gawker published an item which quoted an unnamed Edelman employee who reportedly advised a client, "Sometimes, you just have to stand up there and lie. Make the audience or the reporter believe that everything is ok." Richard Edelman responded by telling Gawker that the report was "completely false and needs to be taken down. You bet we take ethics seriously." This in turn prompted a rejoinder from Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan, who retorted that Edelman himself had been dishonest about the nature of his company's work for Wal-Mart. "You lied and said that the 100% company-controlled Astroturf group 'Working Families for Wal-Mart' was 'A real group of people, as far as I know,'" Nolan stated. "I made the case that that was a blatant lie when I was at PRWeek, and I still believe it." Nolan also pointed to a detailed report in New Yorker magazine, which detailed Edelman's work for Wal-Mart, including its effort to "co-opt liberals" with the help of former Environmental Defense board member and PR pro Leslie Dachs.

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained a copy of the suppressed study and posted it on the internet"For more than seven months, the nation's top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states, reportedly because it contains such potentially 'alarming information' as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates," reports Sheila Kaplan. The 400-page study, undertaken by a division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in cooperation with the government of Canada, "warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen 'areas of concern' -- including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee -- may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants." Canadian biologist Michael Gilbertson, who was involved in reviewing the study, said it has been suppressed because it suggests that vulnerable populations have been harmed by industrial pollutants. "It's not good because it's inconvenient," Gilbertson said. "The whole problem with all this kind of work is wrapped up in that word 'injury.' If you have injury, that implies liability. Liability, of course, implies damages, legal processes, and costs of remedial action. The governments, frankly, in both countries are so heavily aligned with, particularly, the chemical industry, that the word amongst the bureaucracies is that they really do not want any evidence of effect or injury to be allowed out there."

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 Putin pushers, Coach in the classroom and how comic books promote Iraqi special forces. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at the Lincoln Group, spreading their spin beyond Iraq. 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 fallout from the SourceWatch profile on the Canadian global warming skeptics group, Friends of Science (FoS), continues to grow. Mike De Souza reports that Morten Paulsen, who is Senior Vice President and General Manager Fleishman-Hillard Canada, worked as a "volunteer spokesperson for the Conservatives at the same time that he was acting as a paid communications consultant for the Friends of Science." FoS ran a major radio advertising campaign attacking the former Liberal government for its commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions. When FoS president Douglas Leahey was asked who identified the target markets for the ads he stated "I would imagine that would have been (decided by) our public relations consultant (Paulsen)." Paulsen declined to comment on Leahey's suggestion. Liberal member of parliament Mark Holland said that it appeared that Paulsen "might have been directing what ridings specifically material went into and using (the group) as an arm of the Conservative Party of Canada and thus circumventing campaign financing rules."

Hunter College professor Stuart Ewen is crying foul about an "anti-counterfeiting campaign" sponsored on his campus by the Coach Corporation, a manufacturer of handbags, shoes and other women's accessories. To "educate" students about the dangers of knockoff imitatators, Coach paid the university to host a course in "stealth marketing" that involved plastering the campus with fake flyers about the problems of a fictional student named "Heidi Cee," who claimed that she had been conned by a counterfeit Coach handbag. "A corporation-funded university class with a curriculum created by corporate lobbyists is questionable enough," writes Ben Kessler. "According to Ewen, it appears that the class was the result of a direct request made by the president of the university to the department head. No tenured teachers were told about the department's new curricular direction; an untenured (therefore more pliable) faculty member with no marketing background was selected to teach the class. The anointed instructor voiced objections ... but ended up teaching the course anyway, with continuous supervision from a Coach lawyer. At no time, the Coach overseer stipulated, was the company's involvement to be mentioned in any of the completed class projects." The class assignments focused on creating an elaborate fabric of lies using "authentic-seeming fliers, social networking websites, and a blog" supposedly written by "Heidi Cee," in which the fictional student begged real students to help her find her missing Coach handbag and talked about the problem of fake products. When Ewen questioned the Ohio-based public relations firm that created the course about Heidi Cee's fabrications, they replied, "That's what kids do these days: create fake people on the internet."

"Telecommunications industry groups have attacked a new bill calling for government regulators to take a closer look at how broadband providers manage their networks," reports Kenneth Corin. "The Internet Freedom Preservation Act, introduced earlier this week by Rep. Ed Markey, the Democratic chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunication and the Internet, could make it illegal for service providers to block or degrade traffic on their networks. Its introduction revisits the contentious debate over Net neutrality, which has industry groups championing the free market and warning that government intervention threatens to choke off growth and innovation in the Internet economy." (As an example of the kind of "innovation" they have in mind, PC World magazine warned recently that consumers should "get ready for a crackdown on broadband use" in which "Internet users may soon be charged extra for using 'too much' bandwidth or cut off from using some bandwidth-hungry software applications.")

Want to earn up to $2.4 million to produce and distribute across Iraq 12 issues of a comic book designed to "highlight the professionalism of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) and to enhance the public perception of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) as a capable, well-trained, and professional fighting force"? Well, you'll have to compete with the Lincoln Group, the PR firm that previously placed U.S. propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. Last year, the "sole source contract for the 6th Brigade Comic Book went to the Lincoln Group," reports Sharon Weinberger. The comics seem to be a continuation of a project that the Center for Media and Democracy noted back in 2005, when U.S. PsyOps troops were working on "initial character and plot development" for the series. Everyone from the United Nations to the Business Software Alliance has used comics to target young audiences. Wired points out that the U.S. Army also distributes comics in the Philippines, to get an anti-terror, pro-miltiary message to the youth of the country's Sulu islands.

Vladimir Putin and George Bush (July 2007)Ketchum, the PR firm involved in the Armstrong Williams "pundit payola" scandal, helped Vladimir Putin become Time magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2007. The firm also conducted "dozens of media briefings in Moscow, New York and Washington, D.C. for both the Russian Federation and its natural gas monopoly Gazprom," reports O'Dwyer's. Ketchum was paid $845,000 for two months of work for the Russian Federation in early 2007, around the G8 Summit and visits to Moscow by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Ketchum has a $250,000 per month contract with Gazprom; the gas company also pays the Gavin Anderson firm $100,000 per month. In 2007, Ketchum's Gazprom work included "several press and think tank briefings," and organizing "meetings as executives visited the U.S. in late November and early December."

"In a move that legal experts said could present a major test of First Amendment rights in the Internet area, a federal judge in San Francisco ... ordered the disabling of a Web site devoted to disclosing confidential information." The site, Wikileaks, allows people to anonymously post documents and other information. The judge's order disabled the site's U.S. domain name, Wikileaks.org, though the site can still be reached through other addresses. The case was brought by Julius Baer Bank and Trust in the Cayman Islands, after documents allegedly linking the bank to "asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion" were posted on Wikileaks. A later ruling by the same judge "ordered Wikileaks to stop distributing the bank documents." But, in an "overwhelming response" to the case, "'mirror' copies of the website sprouted like weeds" and "bloggers and other fans of the site gave new life to [the] leaked documents the bank was working to suppress," reports the Guardian. "Clearly, the court and Bank Julius Baer underestimated the ingenuity of the web development community," reads a post on the Project on Government Oversight's blog.

Low-income California communities concerned with environmental justice have launched a 21-point "Environmental Justice Movement Declaration." Their position is a challenge to the policies of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is a "national advocate of a cap-and-trade program that would allow heavy polluters, often located in poor neighborhoods, to partly buy their way out of lowering their emissions." Eighteen groups signed the Declaration, including San Joaquin Valley Latino Environmental Advance Project, Oakland's West County Toxics Coalition, the L.A. chapter of the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Delano's Assn. of Irritated Residents. Absent were the "Big Green" groups like Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. "'Under a trading scheme, 11 power plants to be built around Los Angeles could offset emissions by extracting methane from coal seams in Utah or planting trees in Manitoba,' said Jane Williams of the California Communities Against Toxics, which fights pollution in low-income areas." "Cap and trade is a charade to continue business as usual," said Angela Johnson Meszaros, director of the California Environmental Rights Alliance. Cap and trade is an element of the climate bill that has the most support in Congress. It is sponsored by Sens. John Warner of Virginia and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Mark Your Calendar and Save the Date!

The Center for Media and Democracy is marking its 15th anniversary in 2008 -- that's a decade and a half of award-winning muckraking and exposing corporate spin and government propaganda. We hope you'll join us to celebrate!

We're having an after work event on Friday, April 11th in San Francisco. Delicious food, fun music, a tantalizing auction, and fellow CMD friends -- the perfect way to spend an evening!

More details to follow, but put it on your calendar now!

Want to be SURE to have all the info? Send an email to event@PRWatch.org with your name and mailing address and we will be sure you are on the list to get updates!

Since the Superdelegate Transparency Project launched on Congresspedia last week, dozens of people have helped flesh out the facts about the so-called "superdelegates" whose votes may determine whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama emerges as the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. Thanks to the hard work of project organizers at Democratic Convention Watch, OpenLeft and LiteraryOutpost, the Superdelegate Transparency Project (STP for short) has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, National Journal, Wired magazine, and the New York Times. According to the Times, STP is "the kind of tool that the back room bosses from 1984 could never have imagined - and today's political bosses are probably horrified to see. The site includes results of the popular vote district-by-district, the allocation of pledged delegates, details about the superdelegates and how they are pledged and eventually how they will vote. It will also tell you how to contact a superdelegate if you want to become part of a lobbying effort."

This information is vital because the close race between Clinton and Obama may result in a "brokered" convention where the Democratic delegates cut deals and shift sides to give one candidate the threshold needed to gain the party's nomination. The so-called "superdelegates" therefore hold enormous power to shape the outcome of this year's presidential election, and the public deserves to know who they are, how they plan to use that power, and what forces are working to influence them.

Thanks to the work of many volunteers, much of this information has already been compiled, but considerable work still needs to be done. That's why this Thursday we're planning an experiment that we call a "barn raising" - a day-long effort in which we're hoping that many hands can make light work. We'd love it if you could stop by the project and help out. To add to the fun, we've set up an online chat room where you can ask questions, share ideas, and meet some of the people involved in organizing the project. CMD staff will be there, along with STP organizers including Mark Myers, Jennifer Nix and Avelino Maestas.

If you'd like to join in, visit the chat room at http://governation.campfirenow.com/6f4a6 and introduce yourself, or stop by the STP project page, where you'll find a list of things to do and other resources to get you started. We'll have people there all day Thursday, beginning at 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and continuing into the evening. Join us because it will be fun, it's important, and because democracy works best as a participatory process.

A Canadian global warming skeptics group, Friends of Science (FoS), is facing several investigations into a radio advertising blitz it ran in the 2006 election campaign, which criticized the then-Liberal government's support for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Funding for FoS came in part from a University of Calgary trust account. Canwest reported that "facing embarrassing questions raised by the online SourceWatch.org encyclopedia, the university conducted an internal audit over the past year which concluded that its trust account had been used to 'support a partisan viewpoint on climate change.'" While the university closed the trust account, it has refused to make its full audit report public. However, further inquiries are underway. "We are contacting Elections Canada to advise it of the review and why it is under way, and we will follow up with Elections Canada once it is complete," Roman Cooney, the university's vice-president of external relations, wrote in an email to Canwest. Federal Liberal member of Parliament Mark Holland said that he wants parliamentary hearings into the FoS election campaign.

Probably not where your bottled water comes fromRep. Al Wynn of Maryland and Rep. Hilda Solis of California have asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the bottled water industry. One concern is that the packaging of bottled water often uses images of mountain stream and other pristine natural settings, but as much as a third of bottled water comes from municipal water sources. While there are some added filtration steps in the processing, the product is much closer to tap water than consumers are led to believe. Dr. Gina Solomon, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council said "I think that consumers are under the misguided impression that bottled water is being carefully regulated and fully tested, and that it comes from whatever place is on the picture on the label. That's not the case." While the Environmental Protection Agency monitors tap water, it is the Food and Drug Administration that is in charge of bottled water. Unfortunately, the "FDA's standard of quality regulations for bottled water set allowable levels for more than 70 different chemical contaminants."

French researchers are concerned that consumer demand for hybrid cars, fueled by advertising and PR, is slowing down the development of genuinely sustainable green auto technologies. Their report, Hybrid Vehicles: A Temporary Step, states that "There is a general convergence of strategies toward promoting hybrid vehicles as the mid-term solution to very low-emissions and high-mileage vehicles ... Such a convergence is based more on customer perception triggered by very clever marketing and communications campaigns than on pure rational scientific arguments and may result in the need for any manufacturer operating in the USA to have a hybrid electric vehicle in its model range in order to survive." Technologies that may be taking a back seat as a result include hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles. Nearly 24,000 hybrid vehicles were sold in the U.S. in January 2008.

When the dangers of smoking first became widely known, cigarette companies secretly hired biomedical scientists to create confusion. A new study co-authored by TobaccoWiki editor Anne Landman shows that cigarette makers also used sociology to try to shift public opinion. The Social Costs/Social Values Project of the late 1970s and early 1980s paid respected philosophers, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists to develop pro-smoking arguments that avoided any mention of health or medicine. The resulting arguments included that smoking has positive social benefits, that cigarette taxes are regressive, that anti-tobacco advocates act out of self-interest, and that applying a cost-benefit analysis to smoking is inappropriate. Another project, the Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment or ARISE, recruited academics in the 1990s to counteract the information that cigarettes were addictive. ARISE "experts" were paid to attend conferences, write books and give interviews in which they said that smoking, drinking tea, shopping and eating chocolate all promoted good health by relieving stress.

"As Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was blasting Sen. Barack Obama for his ties to the Exelon Corporation, the firm of Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from the very same nuclear energy client," reports Sam Stein. Penn's PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, works for Exelon and the Exelon-funded pro-nuclear group New Jersey Affordable, Clean, Reliable Energy Coalition (NJ ACRE), as the Center for Media and Democracy previously reported. Recently, Exelon paid Burson-Marsteller more than $230,000, coded as "public affairs." Exelon said the work involved NJ ACRE and strengthening local support for "the renewal of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant's operating license." The payment covered Burson-Marsteller's work between June and November 2007, which included carrying out a poll and setting up "speaking engagements and events for Patrick Moore," the Greenpeace activist turned PR consultant and co-chair of the nuclear industry-funded group Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.

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 drug pushers, Microsoft in the classroom and what bottled water and hybrid cars have in common. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at Jack Abramoff, the Kevin Bacon of the lobbying world. 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!

Refugee children from Darfur (International Rescue Committee photo)Corporate sponsors of this summer's Beijing Olympics Games are increasingly nervous. Steven Spielberg recently "withdrew as an artistic adviser for the Beijing Games' opening and closing ceremonies, citing China's ties to the Sudan government." Even athletes are getting in the act, with more than 50 joining "Team Darfur, an organization of past and present Olympians who have pledged to use the Games to highlight what they see as genocide in Darfur." An unnamed "major public relations firm was busy yesterday providing advice to Olympic sponsors and advertisers," reports the Wall Street Journal. "While the firm was telling marketers to 'keep quiet' on the issue if at all possible, it was also advising them to develop a position on Darfur. One executive at the firm says he is likely to tell marketers to also pay attention to internal dynamics at their companies, including employee opinions." Major Olympics sponsors include Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Motors and Eastman Kodak.

"Education is the key to stemming illegal downloads of music and other content," concluded a new study. "Teenagers are less likely to illegally download digital content when they are familiar with copyright laws." The study (PDF) was funded by software giant Microsoft and is being promoted by Weber Shandwick, one of the company's three PR firms. Microsoft's Sheri Erickson said the survey means schools can "prepare students to be good online citizens." But rather than wait for schools to consider the issue, Microsoft hired a "curriculum consulting firm, Topics Education, to develop a pilot program for copyright education in middle and high schools." Microsoft also set up two websites: one that asks teachers to "participate in a Field Test of this brand-new curriculum" and one that asks students to "mix, publish and share" cell phone ring tones created using the site -- after assigning intellectual property usage rights to them. One blogger accused Microsoft of trying "to retrofit 20th century copyright laws onto 21st century realities."

Disgraced U.S. lobbyist Jack Abramoff; graphic from the Village VoiceThe Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU), a coalition of over 140 groups in Europe, has taken the European Commission to task over its "European Transparency Initiative" (ETI), which is supposed to provide public information about the role of lobbyists in influencing decision-making by the European Union. The Commission has said it will begin publishing a register showing which organizations are engaged in lobbying. In an open letter, however, ALTER-EU complains that the register will not include the names of individual lobbyists or the dollar amounts spent lobbying. Without that information, the letter warns, journalists would be unable to use the register to identify and expose "Abramoff-style ... lobbying scandals. ... If the new EU lobbing transparency register does not allow the identification of individual lobbyists, it cannot serve as a tool to investigate 'conflicts of interest' and 'revolving doors.' Leaving out lobbyists' names would put the credibility of the European Transparency Initiative at stake. ... If the EU register will not answer simple questions like 'who are the lobbyists?' or 'how much money is spent on lobbying by whom?,' it would be useless."

Phil Mattera, the research director of Good Jobs First, reflects on the rise and fall of greenwashing during the 1990's and asks whether we are "now seeing a green business boom that will also turn out to be nothing more than hot air?" While a marketing consultancy company, TerraChoice, last year identified what it dubbed as "six sins of greenwashing", Mattera believes that Wal-Mart's attempt at a green corporate makeover involves two other sins. The first is that of "unclean hands." It is "difficult to avoid thinking," he writes, "that the company is using its environmental initiatives to draw attention away from its widely criticized labor practices." The second sin, he suggests, is the "sin of size." "There's a growing sense that true sustainability entails a substantial degree of localism and moderate-size enterprise. That rules out Wal-Mart, no matter what its CEO professes." Mattera also notes that some environmental groups form "partnerships with companies. Such relationships serve to legitimize business initiatives while turning those groups into cheerleaders for their corporate partners. Former Sierra Club president [and Greenpeace board member] Adam Werbach took it a step further and joined the payroll of Wal-Mart."

Waste Management, the U.S. waste disposal company that Rachel's Hazardous Waste News once called "the nation's largest polluter," has been trying to clean up its reputation. "For the last three years it has been spending $25 million to $30 million a year to run print and television advertisements highlighting the amount of energy it generates from burning trash each year (enough to power one million homes), the amount of acreage it has set aside for wildlife habitats (more than 17,000 acres), the number of trees it has saved by recycling paper (41 million last year)," reports Claudia H. Deutsch. The company has also painted all of its garbage trucks green and is circulating eco-slogans such as "Waste Management, helping the world dispose of its problems."

"Here's a recipe for academic controversy," observes Richard C. Paddock: "First, find dozens of hard-core teenage smokers as young as 14 and study their brains with high-tech scans. Second, feed vervet monkeys liquid nicotine and then kill at least six of them to examine their brains. Third, accept $6 million from tobacco giant Philip Morris to pay for it all. Fourth, cloak the project in unusual secrecy." At the University of California-Los Angeles, researchers have done exactly this in what they claim will be a groundbreaking study of addiction that may help people quit smoking. Anti-tobacco activists, however, wonder if Philip Morris may actually be hoping to use the research to design more addictive cigarettes. "It's stunning in this day and age that a university would do secret research for the tobacco industry on the brains of children," said Matt Meyers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "It raises fundamental questions about the integrity, honesty and openness of research anywhere at the University of California."

The Center for Media and Democracy is contributing biweekly radio reports on politics and spin to "Election Unspun," a daily news show put together by Pacifica Radio and Free Speech Radio News. CMD's first "Election Unspun" segment focuses on the public relations pros in the top tier of the Democratic presidential campaigns -- Burson-Marsteller's Mark Penn on Senator Hillary Clinton's team, and David Axelrod of AKP&D Message & Media on Senator Barack Obama's team. Recently, another PR executive became Clinton's campaign manager -- Maggie Williams, who headed the Fenton Communications firm after serving as Clinton's chief of staff, when she was First Lady.

As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama run neck-and-neck in the Democratic primary, a "brokered" convention is possible where the Democratic delegates cut deals and shift sides to give one candidate the threshold they need to gain the party's nomination. About 1/4 of the delegates who will head to Denver in August are so-called "superdelegates" whose voting status comes from their party or elected positions and who are not bound by the results of the primary elections or caucuses in their home states.

Who are these "superdelegates" and which candidate are they committed to? Will they go along with the voters from their state or go their own way? We've teamed up with the folks at Democratic Convention Watch, OpenLeft and LiteraryOutpost to engage citizens like you in tracking down the answers in the new Superdelegate Transparency Project on Congresspedia. There you'll find a variety of ways to help bring transparency to this profoundly important but little-understood process, all with the helpful support of the staff editors if you should require it. Because democracy requires vigilance and accountability.