"War, unlike any other news event, asks profound questions of journalists," writes Roy Greenslade in the Guardian. "How do we separate truth from propaganda? How do we overcome the dilemma of political and military leaders controlling access to vital information? What value do we place on what we see on the frontline as against what we are told back at headquarters? ... These questions hovered over last week's Media Guardian forum on war coverage as reporters and desk-bound decision-makers explained how and why they acted as they did. By coincidence the forum took place while the prime minister's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, was appearing in front of a Commons committee to explain the provenance of his "dodgy dossier" which had persuaded many people, including MPs, that invasion was essential to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his supposed weapons of mass destruction. ... Perhaps the most perceptive and witty comment of all came from James Meek, who in spite of observing battles in the desert, said: 'I felt I missed the war because I hadn't seen it on TV.'"

The U.S. Department of Defense has launched a new $1.7 million ad campaign designed to convince parents and other adults to encourage young people to join the military. The Washington Times reports that campaign features five successful veterans, highlighting "qualities such as commitment and perseverance" that the vets have gained from service. "We focus on the more emotional aspects the military has to offer," George Rogers, vice president of the agency that created the ads, told the Times. "It's a branded ingredient to a successful life." The Times reports, "12-page insert featuring five veterans ran in Sports Illustrated and People magazine last week and was scheduled to appear in Time this week. Full-page ads will continue to run there and in Newsweek until August."

Ten years ago, on June 28, 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court issued "the most influential ruling you've never heard of," says the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy. In the case known as Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., they directing judges to act as "gatekeepers" in the courtroom, excluding expert testimony if they deemed it was "junk science." "But what started as a well-intentioned attempt to ensure reliable and relevant evidentiary science has had troubling consequences. ... Polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products are successfully using Daubert to keep juries from hearing scientific or any other evidence against them."

Former celebrity publicist Lizzie Gruman has changed careers. Grubman spent 37 days in jail following an infamous temper tantrum in which she backed her Mercedes SUV into a crowd outside a Hamptons nightspot, injuring 16 people. She now works as a gossip and entertainment reporter for a New York radio station.

So much for "Operation Iraqi Freedom." William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran report that "U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders." The decision is "creating anger and resentment," but L. Paul Bremer, the PR crisis manager turned overlord of Iraq, says "Elections that are held too early can be destructive." The BBC quotes Bremer's strategy for crushing opposition, which he attributes to "remnants" of Saddam's regime: "We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or... kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country. We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country."

The U.S. Supreme Court voted, 6 to 3, to dismiss Nike's appeal of a California Supreme Court decision on commercial speech. The Court said the case raised "novel constitutional questions" but was not ready for the high court's attention. The case, Nike v. Kasky, centered on whether or not Nike violated California's truth-in-advertising laws with its statements about the working conditions in its overseas factories. Nike and its corporate supporters claim the suit was a First Amendment issue and say it may force them to scale back their PR activites. They charge that corporations' abilitites to defend themselves publicly is limited by the California Supreme Court decision. Kasky and public interest activists say the issue is whether corporation have the right to lie. They say the dismissal is a "victory for democracy and the truth. It also marks a notable sidestep after five decades of Court decisions granting more legal power to corporations."

Eight years ago, in 1995, PR Watch broke the stunning story of how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promoted the use of toxic sewage sludge as cheap farm fertilizer . The major media failed to report the story. This EPA scandal became a long chapter in our 1995 book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, documenting the deceptive EPA PR campaign. We're glad to see that the New York Times is discovering the toxic sludge issue, but it's a little late because today most sewage sludge (including New York city's) is spread onto farmland. One serious error in the Times article is the false and misleading statement that "organic farmers prefer biosolids [the EPA's PR term for sludge] over chemical fertilizers." In fact, the only way to avoid crops and animals raised on sewage sludge is to buy certified organic food. Consumers and organic farmers defeated the EPA's efforts to allow food grown in sludge to be called "organic."

"If we learn nothing else from the war on Iraq and its subsequent occupation, it is that the U.S. ruling class has learned to make ideological warfare as important to its operations as military and economic warfare," write Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster in this excerpt from their upcoming book, The Big Picture: Understanding Media through Political Economy. "A crucial component of this ideological war has been the campaign against 'left-wing media bias,' with the objective of reducing or eliminating the prospect that mainstream U.S. journalism might be at all critical toward elite interests or the system set up to serve those interests."

American TV networks gave the Bush administration glowing coverage of Iraq war in exchange for the relaxation of media ownership rules, according to Michael Wolff, a media commentator and New York Magazine columnist. "Ass kissing has gone on to a profound degree. It's pervasive throughout all these news organisations. They need the FCC to behave in certain ways. In order to do this we have got to go along to get along," said Wolff, who delivered the keynote speech at a MediaGuardian forum on war coverage. Wolff also was critical of the system of the Pentagon embedding journalists with troops. "I have difficulty in understanding why somebody didn't say: 'You're not becoming a war reporter, you're becoming a PR guy'," Wolff said.

The 1st Quarter 2003 issue of PR Watch has now been added to our website. It features several articles by Andy Rowell and Bob Burton that show how drug and biotechnology PR suppresses important health information while persuading patients to consume drugs of questionable safety and efficacy. It also features "Weapons of Mass Deception," an article by PR Watch editor Sheldon Rampton that examines some of the themes covered in our upcoming new book with the same name, which looks at the uses of propaganda in Bush's war on Iraq.

It was apparently just a matter of time. A parody website called the "Faux News Channel, P.N.N. (Pentagon News Network)" has received a letter from attorneys for the Fox News Network. The attorneys object, among other things, to the sale by Faux of "Bill O'Reilly Hitler Youth" t-shirts. They express concern that people may confuse the real Faux with the fake Fox ... or is that vice-versa? Faux responds: "Now isn't that a hoot: to be accused of 'incredibly poor taste' and being 'highly offensive' by a representative of the network responsible for such benchmarks of good taste as 'Temptation Island 3,' 'Joe Millionaire' and 'Stupid Behavior Caught On Tape.' Folks, the irony is so thick around here you can cut it with a knife."

"New York Times reporter Judith Miller played a highly unusual role in an Army unit assigned to search for dangerous Iraqi weapons, according to U.S. military officials," reports Howard Kurtz, "prompting criticism that the unit was turned into what one official called a 'rogue operation.' More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi's headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say. Since interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a 'Judith Miller team,' in the words of one officer close to the situation."

Just as the United States is struggling to deal with major postwar headaches in Iraq, its efforts to pacify Afghanistan appear to be unraveling, according to a new report by a key group of experts sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Asia Society. Titled "Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?", the 24-page document warns that public discontent in Afghanistan has been rising and warns that "failure to stem deteriorating security conditions and to spur economic reconstruction could lead to a reversion to warlord-dominated anarchy and mark a major defeat for the U.S. war on terrorism."

In its recent attempt to revise an EPA report on climate change and the environment, the White House cites a study by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that has drawn harsh criticism from climatologists. "Greenhouse skeptics, pro-industry groups and political conservatives have seized on the results," David Appell writes in Scientific American. "But mainstream climatologists, as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are perturbed that the report has received so much attention; they say the study's conclusions are scientifically dubious and colored by politics. ... 'The fact that it has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away,' comments Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose work Soon and Baliunas refer to.'"

How did the U.S. end up in the growing Iraq quagmire? "One theory is that the neocons, like many in power before them, tend to believe their own propaganda .... The degree to which they helped twist the intelligence about Iraq has become increasingly clear over the past few weeks, as angry intelligence professionals have taken their complaints to the press," journalist Jim Lobe writes. "But hints of a second, not unrelated reason may be found in recent, plain-speaking comments on the enormous budget deficits the administration is running up, even as it continues its drive to cut taxes. 'The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum,' declared a Financial Times editorial last month. The sentiment was seconded by Harvard [sic] economist Paul Krugman in his New York Times column. Krugman, like the Financial Times, argues that the administration ideologues are deliberately creating a fiscal crisis in order to achieve their goal of dismantling a social and economic system that ensured domestic tranquility since the New Deal."

Paul Krugman writes that "There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious. ... [I]f you admit to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to demand accountability - and to do so in the face not only of a powerful, ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain." Our new book, the first documenting Bush's Weapons of Mass Deception, goes on sale July 28th in the U.S., Britain and Australia. You can pre-order it now online or in stores.

Frustrated by survey results showing that "the bottom has fallen out of support for America in most of the Muslim world," Congress is asking the State Department to explain why U.S. image-enhancement efforts are failing. "When you consider that the State Department (DoS) has devoted more money and attention to public-diplomacy efforts in these regions in the past two years than anywhere since the Soviet Union's collapse, it's a sign that something's not working," writes Douglas Quenqua. As Congress sees things, "America's image-polishing campaign in the region should at least have eased the downward trend by now, if not reversed it. They want to know why the dial keeps moving in the wrong direction." (Maybe instead of asking the State Department for answers, they should just read our book.)

"This property for rent. That's what an increasing number of strapped municipalities are proclaiming to Madison Avenue as they make available for advertising, marketing and promotional purposes an expanding range of public places - whether zoos, parks and train stations, or museums, piers and beaches. And while you still may not be able to fight City Hall, in some instances you can rent it for an event. ... 'We call it the city-for-sale phenomenon,' said Gary Ruskin, the executive director at Commercial Alert in Portland, Oregon, an organization dedicated to fighting what he terms ad creep. 'Every one of these is a victory of crass commercialism over local values. Places like parks are intended to be sanctuaries from the more noxious aspects of our commercial culture, refuges from the hustle and bustle of marketing. Instead, they're now degraded into huckstering, up for bid to the corporations with the deepest pockets.' "

The Carlyle Group sits at the epicenter of the military-industrial complex that connects the Bush-Cheney administration with crony capitalism. Dan Briody, discusses The Iron Triangle, his new book about the Carlyle Group, which has recently begun to dabble in media acquisition. "We're looking at the potential for having a real controlling influence in the media," he says. "And I personally would not like to see Carlyle Group controlling the information that I receive on a daily basis."

Following a trend reported in PR Watch, 3rd Quarter 2002 of using PR to improve the image of global capitalism, PR giant Hill & Knowlton has formed a corporate social responsibility (CSR) group. PR Week reports, "The CSR unit will attempt to focus on providing strategic counsel and communications support to CSR programs in areas including public outreach, internal communications, financial communications, community investment, public affairs, and environmental and CSR reporting.

If you're wondering whatever happened to all those alleged weapons discoveries that Fox News reported during the war, Lew Rockwell has compiled a list, along with other examples of dishonesty, error, bias and propaganda at Fox News.

The American Enterprise Institute has launched a new web site, NGOWatch.org, as part of its campaign against nongovernmental organizations, which it says "are unregulated, spared any requirement to account for expenditures, to disclose activities or sources of funding or even to declare their officers." Rather ironic isn't it, that a these sorts of complaints would come from a libertarian think tank that is itself a nongovernmental organization and that does not publicly disclose its own institutional funders? Author and journalist Naomi Klein calls NGOWatch.org a "McCarthyite blacklist, telling tales on any NGO that dares speak against Bush administration policies or in support of international treaties opposed by the White House. "

In George Orwell's 1984 "Ignorance Was Strength" for Big Brother's regime, and so it is for President Bush. "A third of the American public believes U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. And 22 percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons. Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But such weapons have not been found in Iraq, and were never used. Most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. None were Iraqis. ... These results startled the pollsters who conducted and analyzed the surveys. ... Pollsters and political analysts see several reasons for the gaps between facts and beliefs: the public's short attention span on foreign news, fragmentary or conflicting media reports that lacked depth or skepticism and Bush administration efforts to sell a war by oversimplifying the threat. ... Bush has described the preemptive attack on Iraq as "one victory in the war on terror that began Sept. 11." Bush officials also claim that Iraq sheltered and helped al-Qaida operatives. ... And GOP pollsters said any controversy over weapons wouldn't change public attitudes because ridding Iraq of an oppressive regime was reason enough for war for many Americans. 'People supported the war for national security reasons and that shifted to humanitarian reasons when they saw evidence of Saddam's atrocities,' said Republican strategist Frank Luntz."

Clinical trials showed that ViroPharma's anti-cold drug, pleconaril, was little better than a placebo in clinical trials, but that didn't stop hundreds of newspapers from hyping it as a miracle cure. "It fell far short of what any rational person would call a cure," observes Gary Schwitzer. "Yet hundreds of journalists called pleconaril just that - and more - in hundreds of news stories before the drug was ever submitted to the FDA for approval. ... Journalists used an array of superlative terms for the drug -cure, miracle, wonder drug, super drug, a medical first. It was described as 'good news for physicians and their patients,' 'potentially huge,' and as a treatment that 'may drastically help relieve your misery.' It was compared with the search for the Holy Grail and with man's landing on the moon."

The venerable Parent-Teachers Association has begun seeking corporate funding partnerships with companies including Coca-Cola Enterprises, Disney Interactive and Microsoft. "I know the PTA may need money, but when they accept money from whomever, it loses its independence," says parent Loretta Pleasant-Jones. "How can a PTA now turn and say, 'We want the Coke machines out of our schools?' "

"When we fight, we grow and we get stronger," says Wes Boyd of MoveOn.org, one of the participants at the Take Back America conference, which brought together progressive leaders from throughout the U.S. to discuss strategies for taking back America. According to Bob Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, the conference demonstrated that the activists of the Democratic party - "the people who knock on doors, who register people to vote, who bring them to the polls, who talk to their neighbors n are largely united around a progressive 'kitchen table' economics. They don't need to take back the party, they are the party." In contrast with the corporate lobbyists who dominate the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Borosage said that the base activists "only need to organize and assert themselves - and then the limits and isolation of the DLC money politics become clear."

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting says major media is ignoring the story that flawed intelligence " may have been a result of deliberate deception, rather than incompetence." According to FAIR, "former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence. ... Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002. As correspondent David Martin reported: 'Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.' According to CBS, a Pentagon aide's notes from that day quote Rumsfeld asking for the 'best info fast' to 'judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL.' (The initials SH and UBL stand for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.) The notes then quote Rumsfeld as demanding, ominously, that the administration's response 'go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not.'"

"The Supreme Court should decide a case by the end of this month that seemingly pits multiple issues -- all dear to liberal hearts -- against each other: the First Amendment versus decent working conditions overseas and consumer protection," Lisa J. Danetz writes for TomPaine.com. The case, Nike v. Kasky, centers on whether or not Nike violated California's truth-in-advertising laws with its statements about the working conditions in its overseas factories. "Technically, the Court must determine whether the statements at issue should be considered 'commercial' or 'non-commercial' speech," Danetz writes. "Practically speaking, though, the case is about a different but equally important question -- one likely to be decided with no discussion. Namely, do corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals? The issue goes beyond advertising and business practices, directly addressing corporate participation in the political process, and how the government should -- or shouldn't -- regulate this participation."

"What seemed to be a groundswell of protest materialized last week when WorldCom Inc. lawyers arrived at federal court for a hearing on whether the company's agreement to pay a $500 million fine was sufficient punishment for its mammoth fraud. ... Outside the courthouse, a small group of demonstrators rallied" including the Gray Panthers. "The outpouring, though, was hardly spontaneous. Several of the opponents, including protest organizers and petitioners, had ties to Issue Dynamics Inc. (IDI), a Washington-based consulting firm whose clients include some of WorldCom's biggest competitors, such as the regional phone giant Verizon Communications Inc. ... Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe confirmed that IDI is working for the telephone company. 'We are happy to support groups that have similar views as ours, and [IDI] is bringing us together,' Rabe said. ... Rabe would not say how much Verizon is paying IDI. He said Verizon is not the only company contributing to a 'funding pool' on the WorldCom issue, but he declined to identify other participants."

The American Plastics Council recently launched a new marketing campaign that targets women and children. APC, through its ad agency Grey Worldwide, will spend $19 million on TV and print advertising, one of its lowest marketing budgets in the 11 year history of the trade association, MediaPost reports. "Because one of [APC's] targets is mothers of infants, Grey has gotten the American Plastics Council spots on The Newborn Channel. [Grey's Charlie] Herzog said that a lot of baby supplies -- like diapers -- can be made with plastic and it's a great way to get the women thinking about plastic from the beginning of their child's life," MediaPost writes. Public health advocates, however, are critical of the industry's effort to target women and children, whose bodies, they say, are at risk of being contaminated by the toxic additives in plastics.

"The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs," the New York Times reports. "The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems. Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion."

"While the administration of President George W. Bush is aggressively positioning itself as the world leader in the war on terrorism, some families of the Sept. 11 victims say that the facts increasingly contradict that script," reports Eric Boehlert. "The White House long opposed the formation of a blue-ribbon Sept. 11 commission, some say, and even now that panel is underfunded and struggling to build momentum. And, they say, the administration is suppressing a 900-page congressional study, possibly out of fear that the findings will be politically damaging to Bush." According to Monica Gabrielle, whose husband Richard died at the World Trade Center, "As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."

"The Pentagon may make it official policy to include journalists with U.S. military units headed for battle," the Associated Press's Matt Kelley reports. During a panel discussion on media coverage of the Iraq war, outgoing Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke said that Pentagon officials were pleased with the results of embedding journalists with troops. Clarke said she would like to see more reporters accompany U.S. troops in the future, AP reports. "Transparency works," Clarke said. "The good news gets out. The bad news gets dealt with quickly." Clarke also defended the military's handling of Pfc. Jessica Lynch's capture and rescue, denying military officials were the source of any inaccurate or overblown stories. "We were downplaying it," Clarke said. "We weren't hyping it. We weren't spinning it. We don't do that."

Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has publicly challenged the CIA's handling of information about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "Why did the CIA say that they had provided detailed information to the UN inspectors on all of the high and medium suspect sites with the UN, when they had not?" Levin asked. "Did the CIA act in this way in order not to undermine administration policy? Was there another explanation for this? ... It undermines the credibility of the director of intelligence to be making public statements relative to intelligence which are not factually accurate." Levin wants a Senate investigation into whether US intelligence on Iraq was "shaded or exaggerated."

The Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius once wrote, "The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the subject." The editorial board of the Des Moines Register writes, "That is the quote that comes to mind now that a new poll reveals many Americans are misinformed about Iraq." The fact that Americans don't know the truth about the basics is "downright scary. It means Americans are basing their opinions about the Iraq war on misinformation." According to the Register, the findings also suggest a reason why "the Bush administration may not be so concerned about finding the still-elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: It doesn't matter. The people think they were found. The people think Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the Sept. 11 hijackings. The people think it's OK to attack a country. Because they don't know the facts."

"At the request of Congress, the State Department is launching an inquiry into its campaign to polish America's image in Muslim countries over the past two years," PR Week writes. "The move comes just one week after a new Pew Global Attitudes survey showed that negative views of the US are on the rise in the Middle East." Most of the work to be reviewed -- known as the "Shared Values" campaign -- "was spearheaded by former ad executive Charlotte Beers, who left her post as undersecretary of state for public affairs and public diplomacy in March for health reasons." Veteran Middle East diplomat Edward Djerejian will assemble and lead an advisory group that "will consist largely of private-sector PR and media experts," PR Week writes. The United Nations has also organized a forum on "Anti-Americanism: The Job Ahead for U.S. Corporations," featuring panelists including Jack Leslie of the Weber Shandwick PR firm.

Five days before the war began in Iraq, Rand Beers resigned his White House job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," Beers told reporter Laura Blumenfeld. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out." Beers' wife Bonnie described the Bush administration as "a very closed, small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There's almost a religious kind of certainty. There's no curiosity about opposing points of view. It's very scary. There's kind of a ghost agenda."

Victoria "Torie" Clarke is resigning from her position as Department of Defense assistant secretary for public affairs. Clarke says she's leaving her top spot as Pentagon spin doctor for personal reasons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a press release that in her two years of service, Clarke has "developed countless new methods to tell the story of our fighting forces, and bring their courage, dedication, and professionalism into sharp focus for all Americans." As we report in our forthcoming book Weapons of Mass Deception, Clarke is credited with developing the Pentagon's brilliant PR strategy of embedding reporters with troops in Iraq. If investigations are ever held on the selling of the war a key question might become 'what did Torie know, and when did she know it?'

"In its letters to Private Lynch's family and officials at the medical center, obtained by The New York Times, CBS News combined its pitch for a two-hour documentary with many other projects envisioned by the other divisions of its corporate parent, Viacom. In the process, CBS renewed concerns among critics about the independence of news divisions owned by media giants. 'Attached you will find the outlines of a proposal that includes ideas from CBS News, CBS Entertainment, MTV networks and Simon & Schuster publishers,' Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice president, wrote to Private Lynch's military representatives. 'From the distinguished reporting of CBS News to the youthful reach of MTV, we believe this is a unique combination of projects that will do justice to Jessica's inspiring story.' "

Morale among U.S. troops in Iraq is suffering as they find themselves "locked into an increasingly serious battle against guerrilla snipers and bombers who stage regular hit-and-run attacks," reports Edmund L. Andrews. "You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home," said infantryman Pfc. Matthew C. O'Dell. "Tell him to come spend a night in our building." Several soldiers have received psychological counseling after showing signs of combat stress: nightmares, sleeplessness, edginess, outbursts of anger and what a chaplain called "intrusive thoughts." But apparently the thought that we shouldn't be occupying Iraq hasn't yet intruded on people like Arizona resident Carol Drew, who thinks the Iraqis are "selfish and thankless" for "crying and whining about how little food and water there is and blaming it on America." Drew's niece is stationed in Iraq as a soldier. "The soldiers are suffering diarrhea," she reports. "They sleep on the ground in ditches to cover themselves from constant gunfire from the Iraqis. ... She has lost 15 pounds and is weak from lack of proper nutrition and water, but is adamant about being there to do the job that her government has required her to do." (How much "constant gunfire" will it take to persuade her that the Iraqis don't want them there?)

Derrick Z. Jackson examines the "numbing prattle" from US military officials "about the precision of our weaponry, precaution to avoid needless carnage, and promises to investigate possible mistakes." During the war, officials said pledged investigations into civilian casualties, but are now admitting that the "investigations" were never conducted. A recent Associated Press report counted more than 3,000 civilian deaths. The Iraq body count has tallied more than 5,000. Another group, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, is conducting its own count and campaigning for U.S. compensation to family members of the dead.

Discussing whether the profit making side of the media industry had won out over content, former "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman (who was played by Al Pacino in the movie "The Insider") told Australia's Radio National, "It's a situation where the class differential between the people who present, so-called presenters, we call them talent when you work inside the network news organisations, between what they make for instance annually, and what the people who work in the industry make, who actually do most of the reporting and production and writing, is just phenomenal. They become part of if you will, the logo of the corporate organisation. An example would be Frontline, the only documentary series on US network television, it's on public television, has an annual budget that is less than the annual salary of the host of the Today Show ... Katie Couric."

The industry-funded right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has taken aim at non-governmental organizations. During a recent all-day conference, "Nongovernmental Organizations: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few," speakers delivered the message that NGOs "are using their growing prominence and power to pursue a 'liberal' agenda at the international level that threatens U.S. sovereignty and free-market capitalism." According to AEI and the conference co-sponsor, the rightist Institute of Public Affairs of Australia, "NGOs have created their own rules and regulations and demanded that governments and corporations abide by those rules." Jim Lobe writes for OneWorld, "Several speakers praised the work of NGOs ... but stressed that, at the international policy level, much of what they did actually hurt the intended beneficiaries." NGOs' opposition to the use of DDT to fight malaria and to the delivery of genetically-engineered corn in southern Africa were cited as examples of policies which amounted to "eco-imperialism" and showed a "callous disregard for human life."

"President Bush's recent claim that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq highlights two disturbing trends in rhetoric from the White House," observes Bryan Keefer. The first "is the Bush administration's record of factual misstatements and distortions. The second is the administration's - and especially President Bush's - history of strategically ambiguous statements that, while technically or arguably true, imply connections between two things which he cannot directly demonstrate." Keefer explains how Bush has used language to fudge the difference between "weapons" and "weapons programs," to insinuate a relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and to mislead the public about the causes of the U.S. budget deficit and the economic recession.

Most public relations practioners will tell you that PR is about good communication between an organization and its public. But the Guardian's Mark Borkowski finds a different kind of public relations being practiced by political and corporate institutions. To deal with objections to their actions, these institutions "create smokescreens of confusion and perplexity to enable them to do exactly what they want, regardless of the wishes of the people they are supposed to serve," Borkowski writes. "To take matters in order of importance: obfuscation, obfuscation, obfuscation is New Labour's great unsung policy, and the one employed to argue away the government's failure to fulfil its unambiguous electoral promises."

USA Today examines the threat of mad cow disease in the U.S. asking "did you know ... that calves, instead of drinking their mothers' milk, are fed formula made from cows' blood? ... Says John Stauber, [co-]author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?: 'What we need to do is obvious but economically painful for the livestock industry. That's to implement exactly the same regulations that exist in Britain and Europe and ban all feeding of slaughterhouse waste to livestock. Every time there's media attention to this issue, every time consumers and producers start asking questions, we get this lip service out of USDA and FDA that 'Yes, we need to do the right thing; it's just going to take time.' But they're just not ready to bite the bullet -- it's too economically painful for the livestock feed industry."

Image consultants are praising Martha Stewart's bid to get public opinion on her side and to influence potential jurors, reports the Associated Press. The campaign includes a national newspaper advertisement and a new website, marthatalks.com, that went up the day Stewart was indicted in federal court for securities fraud and lying to authorities. Eric Dezenhall, who runs a Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm that specializes in damage control, said the website and controlled message are critical. "She doesn't have a whole variety of options to make people who dislike her like her," Dezenhall told AP. "What she can do is put a press on the Justice Department by having her supporters hammer the narrative that this is a witchhunt." Stewart has hired Citigate Sard Verbinnen, a New York-based firm that specializes in corporate crisis communications and mergers and acquisitions, for her public relations effort.

"The US army has launched a glossy patriotic magazine to rally its 3rd Infantry Division, whose troops face hostile action in the badlands of western Iraq a full two months after Saddam Hussein's ouster," Agence France-Press reports. "Called the 'Liberator', the 16-page in-house publication carries rousing reports from the field to win over homesick troops who might be doubting the rationale for the US presence more than six months after they first arrived in Kuwait to train for the invasion." Specialist Jacob Boyer said in the 5,000-copy launch edition, "Forget about weapons. Forget about national defense. I've found my reason for being here. It's the people." Perhaps not surprisingly, the publication lacks any Iraqi voices or any criticism of US forces.

"Litigation public relations discussions involving lawyers and public relations professionals are protected under attorney-client privilege, according to a ruling last week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan," PR trade publication the Holmes Report writes. "The ruling was hailed by public relations professionals as conferring new credibility on their role and acknowledging a reality of today's legal work. Judge Lewis Kaplan said the privilege -- granted to accountants and some other professionals in earlier cases -- can also extend to conversations between the target and the public relations firm, but only to the extent that the conversations are 'for the purpose of obtaining legal services.'"

"Saudi Arabia breaks ads in the top 25 U.S. markets this month to give Americans a 'better perspective' of the Kingdom, and highlight its 'steadfast commitment' to fighting terrorism. The ads also depict Saudi Arabia as a 'modern nation' with 'normal people' who are struggling against the scourge of terror," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. The Kingdom paid its PR firm Qorvis Communications $1.4 million during its latest six-month reporting period, according to the company's Justice Dept. filing. Qorvis billed $1.2 million of that amount for PR, $150,000 for government relations and $50,000 for research. "The firm's extensive media relations effort included arranging the two-day trip to Saudi Arabia for Katie Couric of 'Today' in which she chatted with Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Saudi Al-Faisal," O'Dwyer's writes. Qorvis also arranged "off the record briefings" for top Saudi spokesman Adel Al-Jubeir attended by major TV and print news outlets.

"Journalists and government officials complained last week that the Bush administration has virtually abandoned its public affairs operation in Baghdad," PR Week reports. "Moroccan ambassador Margaret Tutwiler was sent to oversee the operation in April after major hostilities ended. But according to administration sources, she returned to Morocco within a month. Department of Justice (DoJ) press secretary Mark Corallo arrived in May to handle day-to-day press duties, but stayed just a week after being told by Tutwiler there was no role for him." PR Week reports the U.S. government's public affairs office in Baghdad is barely functional, operating without reliable phones, enough computers, or much accurate information.

"America's big drug companies are intensifying their lobbying efforts to 'change the Canadian health-care system' and eliminate subsidized prescription drug prices enjoyed by Canadians," CanWest News Service reports. "A prescription drug industry spokesman in Washington confirmed to CanWest News Service that information contained in confidential industry documents is accurate and that $1 million US is being added to the already heavily funded drug lobby against the Canadian system." The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) is the leading drug industry trade group behind the increased lobbying and PR campaign. PhRMA is also spending $450,000 to target the booming Canadian Internet pharmacy industry, which provides Americans with prescription drugs at lower prices than in the United States.

The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a US invasion of Iraq, said Greg Thielmann, who served as director of the strategic, proliferation, and military issues office in the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research during the months before the war. "What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did say," said Thielmann. "The area of distortion was greatest in the nuclear field."

"While policy makers and analysts in Washington discuss curbing the spread of militant Islam in the abstract, a political struggle between the American military and hard-line Iraqi religious leaders is steadily intensifying in Iraq," reports David Rohde. U.S. Lt. Col. David Haight recently arrested Sheik Jassim al-Saadi, a young Islamic cleric accused of incitement against the U.S. military presence in Iraq. "Across the country, young American military officers are competing with young, politically savvy Shiite and Sunni clerics for popular support," Rohde writes. "Military officials and residents say some clerics spread false rumors that American soldiers distribute candy wrapped in pornographic pictures, kidnap Iraqi women and girls for prostitution and can see through women's clothing with their night-vision goggles."

"The rules of political engagement have changed, and progressives had best observe the planful discipline that has brought right-wing conservatives to such powerful heights," writes Joe Bevilacqua. "The ladder of these heights was built, rung by rung, through the efforts of non-profit organizations. ... In a slow and calculated manner over the last 30 years, the Right has built a solid organization that is only now reaping the fruits of its labors in the form of unprecedented governmental, corporate and media control. The Left has sat quietly, letting it happen."

The Bush administration has gone into full spin mode and Tony Blair is battling to save his political life, reports Jake Tapper, as charges mount that they lied their way into war.

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) announced the winners of its top award, the Silver Anvil. The Best of Silver Anvil award went to co-winners the U.S. Postal Service and the Presidents Council of State Universities of Michigan. U.S. Postal Service with Burson-Marsteller won for their campaign to restore public trust and confidence in the U.S. Postal Service during and after the fall 2001 anthrax crisis. The Presidents Council of State Universities of Michigan with Marketing Resource Group, Inc. won for a successful campaign that helped defeat a statewide ballot measure, which would have diverted some of Michigan's $300 million tobacco settlement away from college scholarships.

Although the U.S. is allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit Iraq briefly, it has rejected calls for the return of United Nations inspectors to Iraq to join in the hunt for alleged weapons of mass destruction, and chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has sharpened his public criticism. In a BBC interview, Blix said he had been disappointed with the tips his office received prior to the war from British and US intelligence. of the information he received prior to the war from British and U.S. intelligence sources. "Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say," Blix said. "I thought - my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?" His comments came as U.S. officials fought to minimize the political damage from their own leaked intelligence analysis of September 2002, which reported "no reliable evidence" on Iraqi weapons.

Throughout the world, including Muslim countries, people place a high value on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, multi-party systems and equal treatment under the law, reports a 44-nation survey of world opinion conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Support for the United States, however, is another matter. "The speed of the war in Iraq and the prevailing belief that the Iraqi people are better off as a result have modestly improved the image of America," states the survey summary. "But in most countries, opinions of the U.S. are markedly lower than they were a year ago. The war has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era -- the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance."

Inter Press Service reports that "The recent appointment of fast food giant McDonald's to the advisory board of an environmental group has drawn accusations of 'green washing' from environmentalists and led one board member to resign in protest. Paul Hawken, a well-known activist and environmentalist respected for his strong opposition to corporate globalisation, resigned two weeks ago from the Green Business Network... . 'McDonald's doesn't have the expertise, the credibility or the values to be on the steering committee of a green business,' Hawken, a board member since the NGO started its operation in 2000, told IPS in an interview." Meanwhile, as if to prove his point, the fast food chain is suing a prominent Italian food writer for criticizing its offerings. McDonald's wants Edoardo Raspelli to fork over millions of dollars for telling an interviewer, among other things, that 'gastronomically speaking, I find their meals repellent.'

PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber have written a new book, titled Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. Available in bookstores on July 28, Weapons of Mass Deception will be the first book to expose the aggressive public relations campaign used to sell the American public on the war with Iraq. Journalists and book reviewers should email our office to request a review copy.

The Rendon Group, a secretive PR firm whose government clients have included the Pentagon, the CIA, and USAID, has gone to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. The Washington D.C.-based firm is providing "strategic communications counsel, media analysis and consultation support services" to the Joint Chiefs, combatant commanders and top military advisors. O'Dwyer's reports that the Joint Chiefs exercised an option on the Rendon Groups initial four-month $397,000 contract with the Pentagon, awarded without bid following the 9/11 attacks. The Rendon Group has been credited with creating the Iraqi National Congress in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersch reported last year that Rendon received more than $100 million from the CIA for clandestine operations in Iraq between 1991-1996.

Columnist Paul Krugman writes that "the public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility. But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a 'khaki election' next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted."

In a wide-ranging critique of the Matrix-like "false reality" that Americans experience through their TV screens, journalist Bob Parry examines the CIA's recent report on mobile laboratories that it claims were designed to produce biological weapons. "The report reads like one more example of selective intelligence, which spurns plausible alternatives if they don't fit Bush's political needs," Parry states. "Captured scientists said the labs were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. In the CIA-DIA report, U.S. analysts agreed that hydrogen production was a plausible explanation for the labs." Moreover, "U.S. intelligence analysts found no evidence that these labs had been used to make biological weapons or that the two labs alone could produce weaponized BW agents. But that was obviously the wrong answer. ... So the CIA-DIA analysis veered off into an argumentative direction. The report asserted that the labs would be 'inefficient' for producing hydrogen" and "concluded that hydrogen production must be a 'cover story.'"

"[T]he Gray Panthers, a public interest group that defends the rights of senior citizens, took out full page ads in newspapers around the country calling on federal officials to stop awarding federal contracts to MCI WorldCom -- which committed one of the largest corporate frauds in history. ... At the bottom of the ads, in small type, is this: 'This ad was paid for by Gray Panthers.' In fact, the $200,000 spent by the Gray Panthers to place the newspaper ads was raised by Issue Dynamics Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based [PR] consulting firm that represents the Baby Bells in their fight against WorldCom and that specializes in 'bridging gaps between industry and consumer groups on public policy issues.' ... Over the past couple of years, Issue Dynamics played a pivotal role in turning the National Consumers League from a consumer group into a corporate front group. And last year, Sam Simon, Issue Dynamics' founder and president, was named chairman of the board of the National Consumers League ."

In 1997 Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber wrote Mad Cow USA, warning that that mad cow type diseases were possible in the U.S. Even now, in the face of North America's first case of mad cow disease in Canada, the powerful livestock industry and their friends in government are refusing to adopt the strict British standards regarding animal feeding and testing. USA Today editorializes that "Lax federal regulation and enforcement have left the U.S. beef supply and consumers' health unnecessarily vulnerable to an outbreak of mad cow... . ... The 1997 partial ban does not include cattle blood, which is fed to calves as a replacement for milk. ... A total ban on animal additives in animal feed would greatly reduce remaining risks. ... But the cattle industry and the FDA argue that a ban on animal products in feed is unnecessary because adequate safeguards against mad cow already are in place. ... That argument hides the industry's economic incentive to keep low-cost sources of animal protein in the diets of cattle."