Americans' suspicion of official U.S. propaganda has a long history, observes John Brown, a former Foreign Service Officer. Brown traces this tradition to the public backlash against the campaign mounted by the Woodrow Wilson administration to promote support for U.S. entry into World War I. "Hitler admired Allied propaganda," he notes, but "the American public turned against it (and the administration that had created it) after the war." Brown suspects that this tradition may come back to haunt the Bush administration: "The euphoria over the 'victory' in Iraq is now replaced by increasing doubts about how the Bush administration justified and reported on the war. ... Letters to the editor in major newspapers complain that the Bush administration lied about the war. ... Americans' suspicions of propaganda by their own government have a long history. It would not be surprising if this anti-propaganda tradition were to resurface given the growing controversy over the reasons the Bush administration led the country into war."

After retired diplomat Joe Wilson exposed the dishonesty of White House claims about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger, senior administration officials retaliated by outing his wife, an undercover CIA agent. Senator Charles Schumer is calling for an investigation, pointing out that it is a felony to leak a CIA agent's identity. "By disclosing the identity of a reportedly senior undercover operative who is active in our nation's fight against the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), Administration officials have possibly endangered Ms. Plame and her entire network of intelligence contacts in order to avoid political embarrassment," Schumer says.

"When the House voted last week to let Americans import less expensive medicines from Canada and Europe, 53 senators signed a letter opposing the legislation, a letter that the industry trade group, which vigorously opposed the measure, hailed as proof of its argument that the bill would jeopardize patient safety," the New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports. "What the trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, did not say, at the time, was that it helped coordinate the signature campaign. ... The trade group's involvement in gathering signatures, detailed in a document obtained by The Times, is not a surprise. It offers a glimpse into the aggressive efforts by the pharmaceutical manufacturers to defeat the import provision." PhRMA, one of Washington's most influential lobbying groups, has a record of hiding its lobbying activities, often by paying other organizations to promote its interests. With nearly 100 lobbyists registered to represent its interests last year, PhRMA is angering many lawmakers. "This is a multiarmed octopus we're dealing with," said Representative Gil Gutknecht, the Minnesota Republican who is the chief sponsor of the measure. Referring to the trade group, Mr. Gutknecht added, "All roads lead to Pharma."

Tex McCrary, a legendary New York public relations man and political strategist who helped invent the talk-show format on radio and TV, has died at the age of 92. His obituary in the New York Times notes that McCrary helped elected President Eisenhower after serving as a public relations officer for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Richard Severo notes that McCrary also "became one of the first Americans to visit Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. He advised journalists not to write about what they had seen because he did not think Americans could stand to know 'what we've done here.' John Hersey later told the story for The New Yorker. 'I covered it up, and John Hersey uncovered it,' Mr. McCrary said years later. 'That's the difference between a PR man and a reporter.'"

Sludge researchers, activists, and rural residents exposed to land applied sewage sludges across the nation are boycotting today's summit at the Hilton Alexandria Old Town, in Alexandria, Va., organized by the EPA, the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF) and the New England Biosolids and Residuals Association (NEBRA). "We are boycotting this conference because its real purpose is to create an illusion that EPA and the sludge industry are concerned about people getting sick from sludge spreading. Organizers have arranged this conference while continuing to malign and intimidate scientists and citizens who raise concerns about land application," said Barbara Rubin of Neighbors Against Toxic Sludge. PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber exposed the sludge same in our 1995 book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's top spokesman Alastair Campbell's may be the next in a long line of government spinners to take a high-powered spot in corporate public relations. Rumors of Campbell's leaving No. 10 Downing Street, have him "being stalked by international agencies, keen to utilise his government and media contacts," the Financial Times reports. Campbell's potential career path is already well trod. Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer will hang out his shingle as an advisor to top corporate executives. Clinton administration press secretary Mike McCurry now runs Grassroots Enterprise which offers "online technology and communications strategy to help clients achieve their public affairs objectives." "James Rubin, the former State Department spokesman, has become a partner at Brunswick, the UK's leading financial public relations company," the Times writes. "But such high-profile executives must be carefully managed to avoid becoming a liability rather than an asset. One colleague says: 'As a partner, Jamie's got to be able to bring in new business and sustain that business. But it's sensitive. You couldn't take him around the Middle East and expect to pick up Arab clients.'"

BBC's World Service has begun airing the first of a three-part series titled "Spinning to Win," which looks at how governments have spun news and information to audiences at home and abroad in times of war. The series, which covers the period starting with World War II and ending with the recent war in Iraq, includes an interview with our very own PR Watch editor Sheldon Rampton and is available for listening online. Of course, not everyone likes the show. Conservative columnist Barbara Amiel Black, whose husband Conrad owns the Hollinger International media conglomerate, thinks BBC should stifle itself.

"The US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD) unveiled a series of new proposals last week to increase America's presence overseas, while recognizing 21st century dangers and federal budget restraints," PR Week writes. "Center-stage was the 'virtual consulate,' a web-based service that facilitates interaction between citizens of remote foreign regions and the US government. Already functioning in a handful of Russian cities, virtual consulates require no physical US presence and perform approximately half the work of a full-service consulate. ... The recommendations come on the heels of a department-wide reconsideration of US public diplomacy, particularly in the Muslim world. A $15 million post-September 11 ad and outreach campaign spearheaded by ex-secretary for public diplomacy Charlotte Beers met with near-universal criticism and is currently under review by a congressionally mandated advisory group that will recommend changes in the fall. [Consul general Tom] Niblock cited the need to update US interaction with overseas audiences, saying traditional methods such as building embassies were 'big, heavy, and expensive.'"

"The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. ... The Pentagon office overseeing the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, said it was part of a research effort 'to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.' ... Investors would buy and sell futures contracts -- essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. ... [T]he Policy Analysis Market would be a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and two private companies: Net Exchange [and ] ... The Economist magazine. DARPA has received strong criticism from Congress for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns. [U.S. Senator Ron] Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under retired Adm. John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and, in the 1980s, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal."

"The Department of Justice is going on the offensive against critics of the USA Patriot Act," PR Week reports. Civil liberties advocates criticize the legislation for removing checks on law enforcement and undermining Constitutional rights, prompting some state and local governments to pass resolutions condemning the act. "Attorney General John Ashcroft and department spokespeople are now aggressively speaking out to the public and the press with an eye toward setting the record straight," PR Week writes. "Ashcroft used a trip last week to Alaska, one of the states to pass a resolution against the act, as an opportunity to speak out on the issue. He said it was understandable that the public would be concerned about invasions of privacy, but countered, 'We use these tools to secure the liberties of our citizens. We use these tools to save innocent lives.'" The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), however, says that insufficient surveillance powers were not the reason government failed to detect terrorist activities that led to the 9/11 attacks. "The [Congressional report on 9/11] shows that these new powers were not needed and that instead the government must effectively use those already at its disposal,

Journalists in Guatemala have recently been attacked, one fatally, by mobs supporting former dictator Rios Montt who is campaigning to become the country's president. '"The press is the only functioning institution in this country. That is why they either have to control it or scare it,'" said Mario Antonio Sandoval, vice president of the daily Prensa Libre and president of the 6-month-old cable channel Guatevision.

Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, the new book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, arrives in bookstores on Monday, and early book reviews have already begun appearing. We have compiled a list of book reviews and will be updating it periodically.

"Qorvis Communication is helping Saudi Arabia lash out at critics who believe the 'blanked-out' section of the Congressional 9/11 report exposes the Kingdom's involvement in the terror attacks," O'Dwyer's PR reports. "The Bush Administration demanded that the 28-page section dealing with the role played by Saudi Arabia and other governments in 9/11 be omitted from the 900-page report." Qorvis has a $200,000 a month contract with the Kingdom for PR work. Saudi Arabia spent $288,000 at Patton Boggs -- a well connected D.C. lobbying firm and a Qorvis affiliate -- for scheduling and accompanying Embassy officials to meetings with Members of Congress and their staffers, according to a February 2003 O'Dwyer's story.

"Edelman PR Worldwide, which represents the National Dialogue on Cancer, has dropped British American Tobacco as a client in Malaysia, according to The Cancer Letter of July 25," O'Dwyer's PR reports. "Richard and Daniel Edelman had signed a pledge that the firm would not work for tobacco companies when it won the non-profit group's account last October. Edelman's Kuala Lumpur office, however, helped BAT promote 'social reporting,' issuing press releases about scholarships for children of tobacco farmers. Leslie Dach, Edelman's vice chairman, terminated that project when contacted by a reporter from TCL. 'Our policy is that we don't do work for tobacco companies through our companies anywhere in the world,' he told the publication. Dach said the Malaysian BAT work slipped through the cracks," O'Dwyer's writes.

"If President Bush's White House is known for anything, it is competence at delivering a disciplined message and deftness in dealing with bad news," Washington Post's Dan Balz and Walter Pincus write. "That reputation has been badly damaged by the administration's clumsy efforts to explain how a statement based on disputed intelligence ended up in the president's State of the Union address." The shifting White House story about it's references to Iraq, Niger and uranium continues to draw attention to the Bush administration deception. "White House allies outside the government have expressed surprise at the administration's repeated missteps over the past two weeks.... Said one senior administration official, 'These stories get legs when they're mishandled and this story has been badly mishandled.' Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton, said he has been equally surprised by the way this White House has dealt with the controversy. 'Their every move has resulted in people being more interested in the story rather than less interested,' he said," the Post reports.

The Traditional Values Coalition, which bills itself as a Christian advocacy group, has received money behind the scenes from the pharmaceutical industry to campaign against legislation that would enable U.S. citizens to import low-cost prescription drugs from countries like Canada. The drug industry opposes the law because it would undercut the high prices they charge in the U.S. TVC claims (using an analysis supplied by the drug industry) that the law would enable people to obtain RU-486, the so-called "abortion pill" - an analysis that is rejected even by most people in the anti-abortion movement. Other conservatives accuse TVC of accepting "payoffs to tell lies" and waging a "sleazy campaign against pro-life congressmen."

During the war in Iraq, Paul Moran, a TV cameraman for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), was killed by a suicide bomber. After his death, his hometown newspaper discovered that Moran also worked for the Rendon Group, a secretive public relations firm that works with the Pentagon. Now additional information has come to light showing that Moran played an important role with the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a PR front created by Rendon, in feeding stories to the press about Iraq's alleged weapons programs from Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri. "The man who helped orchestrate publicity for al-Haideri was Zaab Sethna, media spokesman for the INC," reports John Hosking. "Sethna spent more than a decade working in and around Iraq. Much of it with his Australian mate Paul Moran. After the INC helped al Haideri escape from Iraq, it was Paul Moran who was called in to do the one television interview that would go around the world."

New York Times reporter Judith Miller has begun revising her first draft of history, some two months after her widely criticized stories made the case that evidence of Saddam's unconventional weapons was being found. In a hindsight account written July 20, Miller belatedly concluded that the postwar search for evidence was plagued by "chaos, disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among military units, and shortages of everything. ... To this day, whether Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown." But as William E. Jackson Jr. notes, it was Miller's own stories in April and May that "made it appear a great deal was being discovered that served to demonstrate the validity of the administration's major reasons for a pre-emptive attack. ... Only after Miller's reporting came under fire from reporters within the Times and in the pages of the Post -- among other newspapers and journals -- did the editors couple her with William Broad to write more skeptically about the alleged successes of the WMD search. ... It is puzzling that a star reporter caught in highly misleading reporting on WMDs would be so protected from the consequences of her actions. Disturbing questions are raised when the Times publishes big stories that travel the same winding road as the Bush administration on the very grave matter of why American soldiers were sent off to war."

"Civic Progress, a St. Louis-based group made up of the heads of the region's largest corporations, is paying Jay Lawrence, who is co-chairman of Fleishman-Hillard's corporate reputation management unit, to play a behind-the-scenes role in the city school reform effort," O'Dwyer's PR reports. "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said the 54-year-old Lawrence, who is a senior VP at F-H, was paid $80,000 for his services to the school board. The paper said Lawrence, who has been at the school board's side at every public appearance since the end of June, has been coaching board members through an almost daily barrage of criticism, setting up media interviews and offering tours of the district's antiquated and much-maligned warehouse. F-H is also donating the equivalent of two full-time PR staffers to the board for the next several weeks. The paper said the St. Louis Public Schools already spends $314,000 annually for PR. That includes the salary of a director, a coordinator, a secretary and a student intern, plus printing and other costs."

"As frustration over their lengthening deployment grows among troops in Iraq, soldiers are smacking head-on into limits on their public speech," writes Steve Liewer, a correspondent for the European version of Stars and Stripes magazine. Troops interviewed in Germany and Iraq say they have been briefed to refer questions to a public affairs specialist and that soldiers have been getting in trouble for speaking out. "I'm not comfortable telling you what I really think, and I'm not going to lie to you, so it's better if I just don't say anything," said one soldier. Another commented, "I find it absurd that these same people we put our lives on the line for can punish us for having our own opinions."

"In England, they shot the messenger," the Los Angeles Times' Robert Scheer writes, referring to the apparent suicide of British biological weapons expert David Kelly. The scientist, who worked for the British Ministry of Defense, found himself at the center of a battle between the British government and the BBC over a BBC report that the government "sexed up" a September 2002 intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons. "Kelly's death and the unraveling justifications for war have created a governmental crisis and prompted calls for Blair to resign," Scheer writes. "Instead of admitting this now-obvious fact, the Blair government unleashed a witch hunt against the BBC and anyone in the Blair administration who might have been a source for the news agency's reporting." Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that the British Secretary of Defense stumbled into a PR blunder. "Geoff Hoon's decision to attend the British grand prix following the death of David Kelly was a public relations gaffe on a par with John Gummer feeding his daughter a beefburger at the height of the BSE crisis," the Guardian writes.

"Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday in a rural West Virginia community bristling with flags, yellow ribbons and TV news trucks," Reuters reports. "But when the 20-year-old supply clerk arrives by Blackhawk helicopter to the embrace of family and friends, media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters. 'It no longer matters in America whether something is true or false. The population has been conditioned to accept anything: sentimental stories, lies, atomic bomb threats,' said John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's magazine." PR Watch's Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber take a close look at how the White House manipulated U.S. public opinion on Iraq in their upcoming book "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq."

"A privacy group is blasting a unit of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its PR plans for a controversial product-ID technology and other internal documents labeled confidential that were posted on its public website," PR Week's John Frank writes. Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) has been raising the red flag over privacy concerns associated with the use of tiny radio-frequency transmitting ID tags in consumer products. MIT's Auto-ID Center is developing the devise, know as an RFID tag, which is said will be used to tell retailers where products are. CASPIAN uncovered documents on the Auto-ID Center's website prepared by PR firm Fleishman-Hillard, giving advice on how the center should handle privacy concerns and win public acceptance for the tags. According to PR Week, the PR plan recommends that external communications "convey inevitability of technology" and that the center develop a plan that "neutralizes opposition."

A USDA program billed to educate schools, parents and children on food irradiation was actually designed to promote irradiation and convince school districts to serve irradiated meat according to a new report by Public Citizen. The public interest group's study, "The Plan of Ten Thousand Mistakes: Minnesota's Misguided Food Irradiation Education Project," points out the project's "numerous flaws, including questionable survey research techniques, failure to provide balanced information, the withdrawal of one of the three school districts, dissemination of inaccurate information, and failure to translate material for non-English-speaking students and parents." Of particular concern is that nearly half of the pilot project's "partners" have ties to Sure Beam, a major food irradiation company, Public Citizen reports.

With international opinion against the United States growing increasingly hostile and economic uncertainty looming at home, U.S. companies are becoming more worried about their appeal abroad. "In an annual survey conducted since 1998, RoperASW has been looking for a connection between the dwindling reputation of America and the worldwide appeal of its top brands, from Disney to Microsoft," Newsweek's Karen Lowry Miller reports. "It had found no such link until this year, when a survey of 30,000 consumers in 30 major economies found that those who felt an increasing alienation from American culture were also likely to report a growing disinclination to eat at McDonald's, or to buy Nike shoes. Most startling, 11 of the top 12 American multinationals saw falling or stagnant scores for 'brand power,' a measure of how well they are known and liked, while nine of the top 12 European and Asian multinationals saw their scores rise," Miller writes.

David Kelly, the scientist whose suicide marked a tragic twist in the unfolding controversy over British intelligence dossiers that supported the war in Iraq, was "ripped apart in the middle" of a "war of spin," said an editor at the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC has come under intense criticism for its reports alleging that top British officials "sexed up" the dossiers, and now it is being criticized on grounds that its reports may have contributed to Kelly's suicide. "Yes, we had a role in it," the editor said. "But the BBC has looked at the way it has handled this entire affair and at this stage we do not believe we could have handled things differently." The BBC stands by its reporting and says it has a tape-recorded interview with Kelly, as well as other evidence showing that it accurately represented Kelly's views. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has bitterly criticized the BBC's reporting, is also coming under intense criticism as government officials fight to evade responsibility for outing Kelly publicly as the BBC's whistleblower. ""Some people can't stop spinning - even now," commented a former Labour minister.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is under pressure following the apparent suicide of Iraq weapons expert David Kelly. An intensely private individual, Kelly came under public scrutiny and was grilled by the Foreign Affairs Committee of Parliament to see if he might be the whistleblower alleged to have told BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan that Blair's government had "sexed up" its September dossier on Iraqi weapons. A judicial inquiry into Kelly's death is expected.

The Baghdad Bulletin, a struggling but lively English-language publication whose British publishers began working almost immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein, offers a range of stories and perspectives about conditions inside the country. The latest issue looks at water and electrical shortages, the emergence of Internet cafes, Iraq's first war crimes museum, and a variety of other topics.

After ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman reported on complaints from U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the White House tried to smear him by leaking the word to cyber-gossip Matt Drudge that Kofman is gay and Canadian. (Oooh!) If they feel that this sort of personal information is important for public discourse, now is as good a time as any to mention that Dick Cheney's daughter is a lesbian, and there are some colorful stories about Drudge's own sexual preferences.

According to Thursday's press and television reports, 33 U.S. soldiers have died in combat since President Bush declared an end to the major fighting in the war on May 2. Actually the numbers are much worse -- and rarely reported by the media. According to official military records, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq since May 2 is actually 85. This includes a staggering number of non-combat deaths. "Even if killed in a non-hostile action, these soldiers are no less dead, their families no less aggrieved," observes Greg Mitchell. "Nevertheless, the media continues to report the much lower figure of 33 as if those are the only deaths that count. A web site called Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is tracking the deaths, by whatever cause, of U.S. military personnel in Iraq.

General John Abizaid, the new chief of U.S. Central Command, has issued a threat aimed at U.S. soldiers who complain publicly about the situation in Iraq. "Some U.S. troops in Iraq have complained publicly about the uncertainty of when they are returning home," write Will Dunham and Michael Georgy. "A group of soldiers aired their concerns on U.S. television on Wednesday, speaking of poor morale and disillusionment with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Abizaid said troops who criticized Rumsfeld in comments to reporters faced possible 'verbal reprimand or something more stringent' from their commanders." But Abizaid himself is contradicting Rumsfeld, who has refused to characterize the situation in Iraq as a guerrilla war. According to Abizaid, U.S. forces are facing "a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it." Why did we get into this mess to begin with? In an interview with Australian radio broadcaster Mick O'Regan, PR Watch editor Sheldon Rampton discusses our new book, Weapons of Mass Deception, about the propaganda used to lead American, British and Australian soldiers into war.

The publication date is rapidly approaching for our new book, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. If you have a web site or weblog, you can help spread the word by adding one of our banner ads.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has condemned a radio scare campaign sponsored by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. "In a bid to defeat legislation that would allow the 'reimportation' of American-made drugs from Canada and Europe, a lobby group calling itself the Seniors Coalition is questioning the safety of Canadian and European prescription drugs," the Toronto Star reports. Reimported drugs are cheaper for seniors to buy. The legislation is part of the $400 billion, 10-year overhaul of the Medicare. "A spokesperson for the Seniors Coalition, Christopher Butler, denied his group is a 'front' for the pharmaceutical industry, but he acknowledged receiving funding from big drug makers. He would not say what proportion of its budget came from the industry," the Star writes.

"A high school teacher, fed up with the Bush administration's popular playing cards featuring Saddam Hussein, 'Chemical Ali' and other most-wanted Iraqis, is now selling her own deck, 'Operation Hidden Agenda,'" writes Kim Curtis. "Kathy Eder's 55 playing cards show pictures of President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others along with quotes, mostly from journalists, questioning the rationale for the U.S.-led war. The backs feature a 1983 photograph of Rumsfeld shaking Sadaam Hussein's hand." Unable to find a publisher, Eder published the cards herself, and they've been selling well, even though many retailers have refused to carry them. "She imitated some of the best marketing minds in the country," said bookstore owner Don Gardner, who says sales of the cards at his store are "running neck-and-neck" with the latest Harry Potter book.

"We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." George W. Bush uttered that amazing sentence yesterday to justify the war in Iraq, according to the Washington Post. "Now a presidential statement so frontally at variance with the universally acknowledged facts obviously presents a problem for the White House press corps," comments Joe Conason. "There's no plausible explanation, unless the president suddenly flashed back to his Yale sophomore philosophy seminar, grappling with the argument that everything we perceive is mere illusion. For the moment, however, let's just assume reality does exist. What possessed the president to make an assertion that everyone on the planet knows to be untrue? And who is going to take the responsibility for this one? Did George Tenet vet Bush's statement? Do the British have a secret dossier proving that Saddam never actually admitted Hans Blix and the UNMOVIC teams? Will Condi Rice or Donald Rumsfeld show up on Fox News next weekend to explain why Bush's statement is 'technically accurate,' even though he shouldn't have said it? As hard to explain as what Bush said is the press corps' failure to report his stunning gaffe."

The U.S. State Department's new Arabic-language magazine hits newsstands in the Middle East this week. Hi magazine "will dispel misinformation and misconceptions about the United States by focusing on similarities between American and Middle Eastern cultures with articles about lifestyle, technology and health," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. "We're fighting a war of ideas as much as a war on terror," Tucker Eskew, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Global Communications, said during a visit to Atlanta. While denying that the magazine is propaganda, Eskew said Hi, which targets18-to-35-year-olds, will promote "American ideals and culture."

A former landfill near Denver is being turned into soccer fields to be used yearly by more than a half-million people, the Denver Post reports. That has county officials spinning a success story for waste management. But public health advocates are crying "foul." The site, which is part of a several million dollar containment project, will also include a dog park and the county's hazardous household waste facility. "You'll be able to run your dogs, dump your hazardous waste and play soccer all in the same place," Jefferson County facilities manager Lee Suttie said. "This quote should land Suttie a raise," Univeristy of Colorado faculty member Adrienne Anderson writes in a letter to the editor. The military-industrial complex-controlled suburban county outside Denver is "where Coors, Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, and/or Lockheed Martin and other polluters have been able to illegally dump their hazardous and even radioactive wastes into Denver metro area streams, municipal water supplies and 'sanitary landfills' for decades without criminal prosecution." Looking the other way, Colorado officials cover up instead of clean up the toxic dumps, Anderson writes, designating sites as "suitable playing fields for little kids and their pets."

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer today ended his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the President's top spokesperson. The man who New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller wrote "often displayed the charm of a cold glass of water behind the briefing room lectern" looks forward to becoming a well paid after-dinner speaker and starting his own Washington consulting firm, Ari Fleischer Communications, that will advise corporate executives on handling the news media. The outgoing press secretary was notorious for dodging questions and thwarting aggressive White House reporters. Corporate Crime Reporter editor Russell Mokhiber documented his interactions with Fleischer, including today's press conference, in his online Commondreams.org feature "Ari & I." Fleischer's longtime deputy Scott McClellan will take over the press secretary duties.

"Kraft Foods' recently announced initiatives on obesity have marked a new phase in how food companies will address Americans' concerns about food and nutrition," PR Week writes. Until now, the food industry has tried to deflect the blame for America's growing waistlines by promoting physical activity. Now Kraft and others are talking about changing products and marketing. "Critics like [Center for Science in the Public Interest's Margo] Wootan see Kraft and other food companies acting primarily out of fear of lawsuits that would rival or surpass those brought against the tobacco industry," PR Week writes. Public health advocates say Kraft has a major credibility issue because of its ownership by Altria Group, formerly Philip Morris. "For example, Kraft has announced the formation of an expert advisory committee to assess the company's response to the obesity problem. But, [industry critic Marion] Nestle said, 'anybody who goes on that committee is flacking for [Altria]. No one who's independent is going to go on that,'" PR week writes.

The industry front group Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of America is striking back at a Christian-sponsored anti-SUV campaign that asked "What Would Jesus Drive?" The Holland (MI) Sentinel reports that SUVOA, which has several hundred members, has created a $17,000 ad that asks, "What Would Jesus (Rivera) Drive?" According to the ad, Rivera drives an SUV because it gets him through the snow in winter, and his wife likes it because she can easily transport their grandchildren. "It's all about safety, utility and versatility. Maybe that's why they call them SUVs," the ad says. The pro-SUV group's president Jason Vines, a consultant with the public relations firm Stratacomm and a former vice president of communications for Ford Motor Co., says the ad is part of SUVOA's membership drive. SUVOA's website calls on SUV owners to sign a petition "asking anti-SUV extremists to stop their venomous attacks against SUVs and their owner." Meanwhile, the anti-SUV group Evangelical Environmental Network wraps up their 11-city "On the Road with What Would Jesus Drive" tour in Washington D.C. with meetings with lawmakers to discuss the "moral issues" surrounding SUVs.

"That the Bush administration misled the public is quite clear; what has been less clear is that it also misled the military," William O'Rourke writes for the Chicago Sun-Times. "If, all along, the cause and the aims of the war had been stated honestly, the military would have prepared for the war they found: one where the regime was toppled quickly and the population did more lasting damage to the country's institutions and infrastructure than our forces did."

What do Osama Bin Laden, the Detroit auto industry and the White House have in common? They all use fear to manipulate the public. The Guardian focuses on the propaganda uses of fear in an excerpt from Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, the upcoming new book by PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. The Guerrilla News Network has also published a review of the book, accompanied by an interview with John Stauber.

Investigative journalist and PR Watch contributor Andrew Rowell's new book, Don't Worry -- It's Safe to Eat, exposes the hidden links between scientists, corporations and the government that have warped policy on three potent issues: genetic engineering (GE), BSE and Foot and Mouth disease. Rowell documents how politicians and corporate spin doctors have twisted the public health debate, allowing for inadequate and flawed regulation of the food industry. As Britain decides whether to become a biotech nation or go GE free, Rowell tells how intense corporate pressure via the White House got respected scientist Arpad Pusztai fired for saying on national British television that he won't eat his GE potatoes.

"With U.S. troops continuing to take casualties in Iraq, less than half of Americans now believe the U.S. is in control of the situation there -- a dramatic decline from April, when 71 percent thought it was," reports CBS News. Moreover, "For the first time a majority now says the Bush administration overestimated the extent of the Iraqis' weapons." According to CostOfWar.com, the cost of the war in Iraq has reached and counting.

"President Bush's stance on Africa should be evaluated on the basis of his administration's policies, not stage-managed trips," Njoki Njoroge Njehu, director of 50 Years Is Enough Network said. As Bush travels through Africa, many have criticized his trip as nothing more than a photo-op. "For example: The administration's position in the WTO limits or denies the means to procure HIV/AIDS medications at a reasonable price; the administration includes South Africa in the list of 35 countries to be punished for not exempting the U.S. from prosecution in the International Criminal Court; ... the 'emergency' $15 billion announced to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa has been spread over several years with no money available so far," Njehu said.

"A month ago the FCC dramatically relaxed media ownership regulations, stifling the cornerstone of American democracy: a free, fair, and open public debate," MediaReform.net writes. "Because one million Americans raised their voices against the FCC decision, the Senate Commerce Committee recently sent a bill to the Senate floor for a vote that would roll back many of the rules." MediaReform.net is calling for people to contact their congressional representatives, asking them to ensure that the public airwaves serve the interests of the people and not the media monopolies.

"Corporate cash has pervaded the health nonprofit world, raising new concerns about medical groups' independence," MSNBC reports. The Center for Science in the Public Interest released a new study that looks at how corporate money co-opts nonprofit organizations. "Organizations that receive substantial funding from companies don't want to offend their supporters. It's natural," CSPI's Michael Jacobson says. iThese affiliations can stifle criticism and that, I think, is an important point because the public perceives independent nonprofit groups as being public-service oriented." MSBN notes that the report "also questions the growth of official-sounding nonprofits that are what Jacobson calls 'corporate creations.' Founders of the Council for Biotechnology Information include chemical firms BASF, Dow, DuPont and Monsanto. Many members of the American Council for Fitness and Nutrition are food industry giants, such as McDonalds, and trade groups like the Snack Food Association."

"Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White House. Zero accountability," writes Russ Baker for TomPaine.com. "It's All Spin, All the Time. Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires correction or apology. Unless, of course, they are pushed to the end of the plank, as they were recently with the tale about Niger and nuclear materials." For the benefit of amateur "revisionist historians" concerned about the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Baker has compiled a "partial, unscientific reconstruction" of fizzled claims, reported facts and White House spin.

"The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa," the New York Times reports. Monday evening after Bush had departed for Africa, White House officials issued a statement in spokesman Ari Fleischer's name that "made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement" made in January's State of the Union address. As of yet, no one has taken responsibility for including in the speech the false claim about Iraq's attempt to acquire enriched uranium from Niger. The acknowledgment came after weeks of questions and contradictory answers in the US and UK about intelligence used by the Bush and Blair administrations to justify an invasion of Iraq. In our new book, Weapons of Mass Deception, we expose the Bush administration's hard sell for a war on Iraq -- an international pitch based on distortions, lies, and misinformation.

"Kraft Foods grabbed the PR high ground in the public debate about obesity and America's unhealthy eating habits by announcing a series of planned changes in how it will make and market its products," PR Week reports. "The changes include increased communications with various groups interested in the obesity issue, as well as proactive efforts to encourage improved child fitness and nutrition." But the Guardian's Mark Borkowski calls Kraft's move "PR at its shabbiest and most shameful. It is an abject demonstration of the way in which PR can create and then exploit an agenda of apparent corporate responsibility to promote a brand, enhance its status, and to set out a stall that provides pre-emptive evidence to guard a company's reputation against future attack." Borkowski points out the dubious nature of Kraft's desire to be "part of the solution," considering that the food company is majority owned by the Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris). O'Dwyer's PR reports the Ad Council has hired GYMR, a Washington, D.C. firm, to handle PR for a government-sponsored anti-obesity campaign. The effort, called "Healthy Lifestyles," has a $125,000 PR budget through December. Eric Leininger, senior VP of marketing services for Kraft, is on the Ad Council's board of directors.

In the past, the lobbyists who populate Washington's K Street were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured lobby firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But as Republican-dominated national politics have created an increasingly one-party system, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street. "If today's GOP leaders put as much energy into shaping K Street as their predecessors did into selecting judges and executive-branch nominees, it's because lobbying jobs have become the foundation of a powerful new force in Washington politics: a Republican political machine," writes Nicholas Confessore. "Like the urban Democratic machines of yore, this one is built upon patronage, contracts, and one-party rule. But unlike legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, who rewarded party functionaries with jobs in the municipal bureaucracy, the GOP is building its machine outside government, among Washington's thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousands of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal."

Alastair Campbell, the communications director for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is at the center of a major controversy sparked by BBC reports that he and other British government officials "sexed up" their Iraq weapons dossier to justify the government's war plans. Campbell fought back by accusing the BBC of lying and demanding an apology. Blair himself called the allegations "as serious an attack on my integrity as there could possibly be." The BBC, however, stands by its story. Two British parliamentary select committees have been conducting hearings into the affair, with a report from the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee due out July 7.

Veteran peace activist William "Bud" Combs recently spent 90 days in jail for protesting against Fort Benning's Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (aka the School of the Americas). "What the veteran peace activist didn't know was that he would spend eight days of his sentence in solitary confinement," writes Bill Berlow. "His apparent offense: receiving and sharing with other inmates what federal authorities consider disruptive, if not subversive, political literature. The offending 'propaganda' included commentary by such extremists as Bill Moyers and Ellen Goodman, and included an article published in Reader's Digest. The common thread was that they all questioned the wisdom of government policy."

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the war that "ended" on May 1 is still underway. "Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal," writes Jeffrey Gettleman. "Since major combat for the 150,000 troops in Iraq was declared over on May 1, more than 60 Americans, including 25 killed in hostile encounters, have died in Iraq, about half the number of deaths in the two months of the initial campaign. Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session. 'They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back,' said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart."

Thirty-one corporate criminals gave more than $9 million to the Democratic and Republican parties during the 2002 election cycle, according to a report by Corporate Crime Reporter. They gave $7.2 million to Republicans (77 percent) and $2.1 million to Democrats (23 percent). The top five corporations, ranked by amount given to politicians, were Archer Daniels Midland ($1.7 million), Pfizer ($1.1 million), Chevron ($875,400), Northrop Grumman ($741,250), and American Airlines ($655,593).

"For the first time since the beginning of the war in Iraq, a solid majority of Americans believe the Bush administration either 'stretched the truth' about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or told outright lies, according to a new opinion survey," Agence France-Presse reports. A University of Maryland poll conducted from June 18 to 25 found that 52 percent of respondents said they believed President George W. Bush and his aides were "stretching the truth, but not making false statements" about Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear programs. O'Dwyer's PR editor Kevin McCauley writes, "America has awoken from its slumber. People are finally realizing that they were bamboozled by the Administration into going to war with Iraq. A Gallup poll, released July 1, finds that 56 percent of Americans say Iraq 'was worth going to war for.' That's down sharply from the 73 percent who answered that way in mid-April after the U.S. military took control of Baghdad."

Through a whistleblower, the Center for Media & Democracy has obtained a list of financial contributors to the "Center for Consumer Freedom," a front group for the tobacco, restaurant and liquor industries that represents itself as an advocate for consumers' rights. Highlights of the list, which we have added to the group's profile on our Disinfopedia, include $200,000 apiece from Coca-Cola, Excel/Cargill, Monsanto, Tyson Foods and Wendy's International; $164,000 from Outback Steakhouse, and $100,000 from Pilgrim's Pride Corporation.

The American Chemistry Council is considering an advertising campaign by ad giant Ogilvy & Mather "that would convey to the American public how essential the chemical industry is to modern life." The chemical industry trade association saw the campaign proposal, which could cost several hundred thousand dollars, at its recent exclusive membership meeting, reports Michael McCoy in Chemical & Engineer News. Ogilvy's initial market research "shows that the campaign could really 'move the needle' on the public's dim view of the industry. ... The campaign's central theme is the word essential, which is linked in print to other key words with a subscripted 2, as in essential2knowledge, essential2makebelieve, essential2economicgrowth. ... A typical ad, titled 'essential2security,' shows a man holding a shooting target over his chest. Accompanying text informs us that the chemical industry is 'Fibers that make aircraft invisible to radar. Cloth that stops bullets. High-strength carbon fibers that build satellites. Nylon for parachutes and ropes,'" McCoy writes.

This spring, the Dr. Pepper company recruited bloggers to talk up "Raging Cow," a flavored-milk drink. "The company hoped to work up Internet buzz about the beverage - and it was OK, by the way, if the bloggers didn't mention that Dr Pepper had given them freebies and flown them to Dallas for a pep session," writes James Hebert, who examines several examples of the old PR trick of "getting a supposedly independent third party to tout your product."

A favorite PR trick of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is known as the big lie tactic -- repeating a falsehood over and over until most people believe it . Unfortunately, as we relate in our new book Weapons of Mass Deception, lies worked well in selling the war on Iraq. The Associated Press reports that "7 in 10 people in a poll say the Bush administration implied that Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States. And a majority, 52 percent, say they believe the United States has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with the al-Qaida terrorist organization. The number that believes this country has found weapons of mass destruction is 23 percent, down from 34 percent in May, according to a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. Prewar assertions by the Bush administration about al-Qaida's ties to the Iraqi government have not been proven, and weapons of mass destruction have not been found since the invasion of Iraq."