"Few doctors have heard of the world's leading medical public relations companies - Edelman, Ruder Finn, Noonan/Russo Presence, the Shire Health Group, and Medical Action Communications, among others," write Bob Burton and Andy Rowell in the British Medical Journal. "Yet barely a day passes without most doctors or their patients being exposed to messages that have been carefully crafted by these public relations companies, aimed at boosting sales of their clients' drugs." Several other articles in the same issue of the BMJ examine the ethical conflicts of interest involved in drug company PR and the crisis of confidence they have helped create for the health care industry.

In a candid interview about being a conservative reporter, Weekly Standard senior writer Matt Labash explained to JournalismJobs.com why conservative media has become so popular. "Because they feed the rage," Labash said. "We bring the pain to the liberal media. I say that mockingly, but it's true somewhat. We come with a strong point of view and people like point of view journalism. While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. ... Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket." Former executive editor of George Magazine Richard Blow commented on the interview, "I suspect that liberals would rather calm angry passions than incite them, that they seek harmony rather than promote division, and as earnest as that may sound, I still think it's better."

"Documents released yesterday in the case of a drug company whistle-blower shed light on how extensively doctors were involved in promoting unapproved uses of a Warner-Lambert drug, Neurontin. Warner-Lambert paid dozens of doctors tens of thousands of dollars each to speak to other physicians about how Neurontin, an epilepsy drug, could be prescribed for more than a dozen other medical uses that had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The top speaker for Neurontin, Dr. B. J. Wilder, a former professor of neurology at the University of Florida, received more than $300,000 for speeches given from 1994 to 1997, according to a court filing. Six other doctors, including some from top medical schools, received more than $100,000 each."

Columnist Paul Krugman compares the war on Iraq to the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, saying that "if you don't think it bears a resemblance to recent events, you're in denial" because "much of the supposed justification for the war turns out to have been fictional. The war was justified to the public by links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. No evidence of the Qaeda link has ever surfaced, and no W.M.D.'s that could have posed any threat to the U.S. or its allies have been found. ... Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for 'bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.' ... For the time being, the public doesn't seem to care - or even want to know. A new poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes finds that 41 percent of Americans either believe that W.M.D.'s have been found, or aren't sure."

"The American people were manipulated" about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, says a member of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Several U.S. intelligence officers who are angry about the politicized distortion of their work and have formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. "While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes," they stated in an open letter to President Bush, "never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war."

"The nation's top broadcasters have met behind closed doors with Federal Communications Commission officials more than 70 times to discuss a sweeping set of proposals to relax media ownership rules," the Center for Public Integrity writes. "The private sessions included dozens of meetings between broadcasters and the agency's five commissioners and their top advisors. A June 2 vote is scheduled on the controversial proposals, which critics fear will touch off a major new round of media consolidation. In contrast, FCC officials held five private sessions with Consumers Union and the Media Access Project, the two major consumer groups working on the issue, since the proposals first surfaced eight months ago."

"Before arriving in Doha, I had spent hours watching CNN back home, and I was sadly reminded of the network's steady decline in recent years," writes Michael Massing. "Paula Zahn looked and talked like a cheerleader for the US forces; Aaron Brown kept reaching for the profound remark without ever finding it; Wolf Blitzer politely interviewed Washington's high and mighty, seldom asking a pointed question. None of them, however, appeared on the broadcasts I saw in Doha. CNN International bore more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic edition - a difference that showed just how market-driven were the tone and content of the broadcasts. For the most part, US news organizations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see."

In the wake of the war in Iraq, a number of questions have arisen about events during the war and Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Brendan Nyhan and Bryan Keefer sift through the evidence to date and attempt to separate spin from reality regarding events including the looting of Iraq's National Museum and the capture and rescue of Private Jessica Lynch.

"Public relations was a game," former Hill & Knowlton chair Dick Cheney (no relation to the vice president) told the New York Times' Geraldine Fabrikant. "It was a fun game, but it was really just a game," said Cheney, who left PR to become a psychoanalyst. Cheney worked for H&K, one of the world's largest PR firms, on business takeovers between 1960 and 1993. Comments on the O'Dwyer's PR Daily website take issue with Cheney's career move. "Cheney helps one person at a time but a good PR writer helps millions," Ron Levy writes. "PR person with health accounts can lead patients to knowledge of drugs that help the mind and the body. ... Cheney charges people for his advice but PR brings the public advice FREE from the world's leading experts ... --experts who become increasingly expert at their specialties while Cheney spent time at what he now calls a game."

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a booklet put out by the Australasian Menopause Society that "suggested [hormone replacement therapy] could prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's and ageing skin, yet ... failed to mention the established side-effect of blood clots, or the accumulating evidence that the drugs were causing heart disease" was drafted by HRT manufacturer, Wyeth, and its PR firm, Hill & Knowlton. HRT's revenues for Wyeth are $3 billion a year. With the release of a major study that reports a particular combination of hormones are twice as likely to lead to dementia for older women, the Herald writes, "there is more concern about Wyeth's behind-the-scenes activities. Scientists who conducted the dementia study are concerned that the company secretly briefed selected medical societies long before today's JAMA paper was out, in order to allow those societies plenty of time to prepare positions for the PR battle that is certain to erupt."

"[I]n a way the term public relations is misleading, because the vast majority of PR is hidden from the public," David Miller writes in the British magazine Red Pepper. "PR is much more important than just media spin. It is the very lifeblood of the global capitalist system. PR can only flourish as a profession and an industry in a society run on market principles. The further a society moves away from neo-liberal dogma the less role there is for the PR industry and vice versa."

"Public confidence in the media, already low, continues to dip," reports Peter Johnson. In a recent survey, only 36 percent of respondents, among the lowest in years, believe news organizations get the facts straight.

The leading PR trade association, the Public Relations Society of America, is calling on its 20,000 members to organize a "broad grassroots initiative to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to postpone its scheduled June 2 vote on the biennial review of regulations for broadcast ownership." The group, which represents government, corporate, institutional and individual public relations practitioners, says it advocates postponement of the FCC vote "until the Commission proactively encourages full public participation in an open, robust debate and discussion of this critically important issue." "This is a matter of transparency," said PRSA president and CEO Reed Bolton Byrum. "We encourage free and open debate of salient issues in our society - whether in government or institutional America."

The White House is dedicating $60 million to the proposed Middle East TV Network. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency, will oversee the network, which will be headed by former CNN Washington bureau chief William Headline. "The BBG is currently doing market research in several Muslim countries that will determine the network's programming," PR Week writes. "Government officials are insisting that the network's purpose is not to influence Muslims with US propaganda, but to bring independent journalism into a region more accustomed to government-controlled press. 'The network would present objective news and information in a format similar to an American cable news network,' read a BBG statement."

"Critics say the chance of hearing unique and offbeat voices in broadcasting could drop dramatically even as the number of outlets proliferates when the Federal Communications Commission votes on media ownership rules in about a week," reports Reshma Kapadia. "Like the Wal-Mart supercenters that have crowded out the mom-and-pop stores on Main Street and changed the U.S. retail landscape, the five major media owners could tighten their grip on programming, squeezing out local and independent views."

In 1997 Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber wrote Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here. To further public education the book is now available free on our website as a PDF download. It predicted that Mad Cow Disease and similar ailments were likely to emerge in North America since the US (and Canada following its lead) refused to ban all feeding of slaughterhouse waste to livestock. For instance, US and Canadian dairy calves are fed milk formula containing cattle blood plasma, even though blood can transmit mad cow and similar diseases. Mad Cow Disease has now been found in Canada and contaminated feed is a likely source according to the Canadian government. To keep abreast of this issue bookmark the website of the Organic Consumers Association

John Stossel has been promoted to co-anchor of ABC's 20/20 TV program. According to a source within the network, "These are conservative times... the network wants somebody to match the times." Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) points to Stossel's history of "bungled facts and twisted logic" and asks if "a record of credible and accurate reporting" shouldn't be more important than "matching the perceived political climate."

"APCO Worldwide, a Grey Global Group unit, has set up an Iraq reconstruction task force with a personnel roster of ex-government heavyweights to guide clients through the process of pursuing contracts," trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "Marc Ginsberg, former special coordinator for Middle East and Mediterranean trade and economic policy and ambassador to Morocco who is a senior VP at APCO, is heading the team. The rebuilding advisement team includes Former Sen. Don Riegle, ex-chairman of the Senate Banking Committee; five-year Federal Aviation Administration head Jane Garvey; ex-Rep. Steve Solarz, a Middle East expert formerly on the House International Affairs Committee, and Richard Allen, who was President Reagan's national security advisor."

A new project by the Center for Public Integrity takes a close look at the telecommunications industry and its regulatory body, the Federal Communications Commission. Visitors to OpenAirWaves.org will find the CPI's "first-of-its-kind, 65,000 record, searchable database containing ownership information on virtually every radio station, television station, cable television system and telephone company in America." CPI also looked at FCC travel records. They report that the FCC commissioners "have been showered with nearly $2.8 million in travel and entertainment

The Central Intelligence Agency classified and withheld from public release a 25-year-old joke item in a weekly terrorism report about the terrorist threat to Santa Claus, notes a new report on government secrecy. "The CIA's secret Santa" leads what the report calls a "lengthy compilation of declassified documents that illustrate the arbitrary and capricious decision making that all too often characterizes the U.S. government's national security secrecy system." The government has also classified classified information to maintain a number of other, more serious "dubious secrets", such as intelligence budgets dating back to 1947 and death squad activities in El Salvador that would have undermined Congressional approval for military aid.

An angry public response forced the Pentagon to publicly back away from its Total Information Awareness surveillance program. Now it's back, with one major revision: a name change. Instead of "Total Information Awareness," they're calling it "Terrorism Information Awareness." According to Washington Post correspondent Ariana Eunjung Cha, the proposed system "would have the power to track people as never before. It would identify people at great distances by the irises of their eyes, the grooves in their face or even their gait. It would look for suspicious patterns in video footage of people's movements. And it would analyze airline ticket purchases, visa applications, as well as financial, medical, educational and biometric records to try to predict terrorists' acts or catch them in the planning stage." Another TIA proposal, the "Misinformation Detection" system, will analyze language and other aspects of text for false or misleading information. (It won't have far to look.)

"A majority of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) intends to ratify a sweeping plan to weaken or eliminate rules that limit the size and power of media companies," media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes. Among other things, the changes would allow a company to own a newspaper and a TV station in the same market, and would significantly increase the number of TV stations one company can own. The FCC is scheduled to vote June 2 on the proposal. MediaReform.net says the move will create "the biggest wave of media consolidation in history." The website and other media activist groups are calling on citizens to contact Congress and FCC commissioners asking them to allow for more public education and debate on the proposed rule changes. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and two Democratic FCC commissioners have already asked FCC chair Michael Powell to postpone the vote. The sparse TV network news coverage of the ownership proposal has itself drawn criticism. "These networks are all owned by companies that stand to profit from the FCC's plan to re-shape the media landscape. Their scant coverage of these issues-- ranging from very little at ABC to none at all at NBC-- reflects a glaring conflict of interest," FAIR writes.

Several high school teachers in New Mexico have been suspended or fired after refusing to enforce pro-war views in their classrooms. Geoff Barrett, a teacher at Albuquerque's Highland High School, was suspended after refusing to remove student-made artwork expressing views on the recent U.S. war against Iraq. The artwork included both pro- and antiwar views, but he was advised that the "pro-war" posters were not "pro-war enough." Bill Nevins of Rio Rancho High School lost his job and a poetry team that he advised has been disbanded after one of his students read an anti-war poem over the school's PA system. Several other teachers have been suspended after refusing to remove anti-war posters from their classrooms. "Meanwhile, pro-war, militaristic signs, posters and bumper stickers abound at many Albuquerque and Rio Rancho schools," note Eric Haas and Jama Fisk.

The Pentagon has renamed its controversial Total Information Awareness program "Terrorist Information Awareness," Reuters reports. In an effort to address concerns that TIA would allow unfettered surveillance by combing computer records, the Pentagon told Congress that "the program would have built-in mechanisms to ensure that it did not intrude on Americans' privacy." Meanwhile the Pentagon announced a new office to set "the defense priorities for the intelligence community." It will be called the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Pentagon.

Responding to an in-depth Washington Post expose, The Nature Conservancy has hired Edelman PR Worldwide for damage control. The Post's multi-part article portrayed the environmental non-profit, which has $3 billion in assets, as a willing dealmaker for the benefit of its corporate supporters and trustees. According to O'Dwyer's PR Daily, the Arlington, Va.-based group is desperate to avoid Congressional inquiry into its activities. The Nature Conservancy's PR strategy includes "Capitol Hill visits, calls to donors, third-party letters to newspapers, full-page advertisements and attempts to pacify charitable foundations, according to TNC documents obtained by the Post." The group criticized the Post's series for "focusing on a narrow set of isolated problems" that do not "present an honest or comprehensive picture of the work of The Conservancy."

"US efforts to re-establish Iraq's media hit a milestone last week as defense contractor Scientific Applications International (SAI) rolled out the country's first post-Saddam newspaper and original TV news program," PR Week reports. "The 30-minute nightly news show, staffed by Iraqi journalists formerly in exile, reportedly addresses concerns about electricity, water, and lawlessness in the region. The twice-weekly newspaper, al Sabah ("the Dawn"), began printing on Thursday with an initial run of 50,000 copies. The short-term goal is to quell unrest among Iraqis by establishing America's presence and control over basic issues. The San Diego-based information-technology firm holds a Pentagon-issued contract to set up a media operation in post-war Iraq in coordination with Psychological Operations and the White House communications staff. SAI referred all questions about the contract to the Pentagon, which would not comment beyond confirming the price of the contract, which is $45 million."

PR giant Burson-Marsteller has hired Bennett Freeman as managing director for Corporate Responsibility in the firm's U.S. Corporate and Financial Practice. The former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor "will lead the fast-growing specialty area that advises the firm's corporate and institutional clients on corporate responsibility policies, stakeholder engagement strategies, and international standards and initiatives that address human rights, labor rights, the environment and sustainable development." Freeman serves on the Board of Directors of Oxfam America and on the Business and Economic Relations Group of Amnesty International USA.

"The situation in Iraq, even by friendly accounts, seems to be deteriorating," writes William Pfaff, "and unfriendly accounts in both the British and the French press are scathing." According to the international relief organization CARE, millions of people in Iraq are at risk as water and sewage systems crumble. "Many people do not have access to safe drinking water, and human waste is backing up and out of the drains in many parts of Baghdad," said CARE's Nick Southern. "The very hot season is coming, when temperatures will climb to 110 degrees and higher. This is a recipe for infectious diseases like cholera and typhoid."

"Conspicuously missing from the ubiquitous Iraq war critique was the subtle agenda of water rights in the parched Middle East region," writes Leah C. Wells. "The dialogue about access to clean water is commonplace in peace talks throughout the Middle East, but Western diplomats rarely broach the topic. An anonymous U.S. State Department official quoted in National Geographic said, 'people outside the region tend not to hear about the issue (of water). It just doesn't make the news.' By design, not by accident, this issue is obscured from Western eyes because the propaganda machinery from Washington, DC has not allowed it."

Our First Quarter 2003 issue of PR Watch detailed the British American Tobacco company's effort to reposition itself as "socially responsible." Now the Center for Public Integrity has produced a detailed report, citing internal industry documents, showing how the tobacco industry is using "social responsibility" to "prevent the enactment of a tough worldwide treaty" regulating tobacco marketing.

"We pay particular attention to not only what the president says but what the American people see," White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller. "Americans are leading busy lives, and sometimes they don't have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals as communicators." Bumiller writes the Bush administration is "going far beyond the foundations in stagecraft set by the Reagan White House, is using the powers of television and technology to promote a presidency like never before." The Times' Paul Krugman see the White House's "pursuit of televised glory" coming at the expense of real world accomplishments. "Mr. Bush strikes heroic poses on TV, but his administration neglects anything that isn't photogenic," Krugman writes.

"There must have been two wars in Iraq. There was the war I saw and wrote about as a print journalist embedded with a tank company of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Then there was the war that many Americans saw, or wanted to see, on TV," writes Ron Martz , a former Marine and military-affairs reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I saw and wrote about a war that was confusing and chaotic, as are all wars. It was a war in which plans and missions changed almost daily - and on one occasion changed three times in an hour. It was a war in which civilians died and were horribly wounded. ... The war they saw, or thought they saw, on TV was meticulously planned, flawlessly executed - and not a single member of the armed forces had a complaint or problem. Few civilians died in that war."

While lobbyists and their employers in 39 states spent more than $715 million wining, dining and generally influencing state lawmakers in 2002, many details about how those dollars were spent remain hidden from public view, according to a comprehensive analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

The dramatic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch became one of the big moments of the war, but her Iraqi doctors say the rescue was staged. "We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital. "It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan." And there was "one more twist," notes John Kampfner. "Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance." British spin doctors are critical of how their U.S. counterparts handled communications during the war. Kampfner reports that Simon Wren, a top UK spokesman, "wrote a confidential five-page letter to [Downing Street's] Alastair Campbell complaining that the American briefers weren't up to the job. He described the Lynch presentation as embarrassing." According to Wren, the Lynch incident was 'hugely overblown' and symptomatic of a bigger problem. "The Americans never got out there and explained what was going on in the war," he said. "All they needed to be was open and honest. They were too vague, too scared of engaging with the media."

"Now that the feel-good, flag-waving part of war is over, the real culprits, the commercial-broadcast media, are going to pack up and leave," says longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges. "What they've done is a huge disservice to the nation. They have no sense of responsibility to continue reporting as the story gets more complicated and difficult to report." The result, he fears, is that "we'll see Iraq in terms of flare-ups and incidents, without any context or sense of what's happening or why. That makes it difficult for us to have informed judgments."

The White House expects congressional funding to the tune of $64 million for the first-ever, 24-hour Arabic-language satellite television network. "The aim is to provide the Middle East's tens of millions of viewers with an alternative to their usual viewing diet of unremediated anti-American propaganda," the Hill's Melissa Seckora reports. Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), called the proposed network "the most important public diplomacy initiative of our time." Westwood One media mogul Norman Pattiz, who sits on the BBG and has produced TV news for Iraq, bills the proposed Mid-East TV as a "journalistic mission" to "promote and sustain freedom and democracy," the Hil reports. "We want to give the Arab world an example of what a free press is. We want to do it in a way that is not like the sensationalistic approach taken by the media in that region, one that includes incitement to violence and disinformation," Pattiz said.

Fearing the Indian Point nuclear plant is an appealing target for terrorists, neighbors, activists and local officials are demanding that parent company Entergy shut down the facility, which is located 35 miles upstream from New York City. The New Orleans-based energy company, which owns nine other nuclear power plants, hired former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's PR firm to help out with security and crisis management issues. O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports that Entergy enlisted Giuliani Partners for its "real-world public safety experience" earned following the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. "Giuliani's firm includes former NYC police commissioner Bernard Kerik and fire chief Tom Von Essen. Kerik is to represent Entergy as 'in-house consultant,' and represent it before public hearings," O'Dwyer's writes. Burson-Marsteller does PR for Entergy.

The proposal to change the FCC's media ownership regulations "may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish," the New York Times Paul Krugman writes. Krugman warns of the danger of quid pro quos between the administration and big media. "Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration -- say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story. Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. ... We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to."

When George W. Bush visited the Santa Clara production facility of United Defense last week, most reports focused on Bush's praise for the company and its products. What wasn't covered was that the maker of the Bradley fighting vehicle and the Hercules tank recovery vehicle is controlled by the Carlyle Group and that George H.W. Bush is a paid adviser to United Defense. The Corporate Crime Reporter writes that the White House denied any impropriety in Bush Jr.'s visit to the plant. "[W]hat if the President's father was the President of United Defense," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was asked. "Would that be unethical?" Fleischer responded, "What if the President's father was on Social Security, and the President wanted to strengthen the Social Security system so that all Americans could have a strong retirement?" Financial journalist Dan Briody, who wrote The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, told CCR, "Ari is very good at what he does. In this case his job is to dismiss and diffuse an obvious conflict of interest by using humor and logical fallacies."

With George W. Bush proudly proclaiming victory in Iraq, many worldwide continue to ask, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" In the U.S., "Some [Congressional] members are beginning to ask and to wonder, but cautiously," a senior legislative aide told the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. "For many, it makes little difference. We vanquished a bad guy and liberated the Iraqi people. Some are astute enough to recognize that the alleged imminent W.M.D. threat to the U.S. was a pretext. I sometimes have to pinch myself when friends or family ask with incredulity about the lack of W.M.D., and remind myself that the average person has the idea that there are mountains of the stuff over there, ready to be tripped over. The more time elapses, the more people are going to wonder about this, but I don't think it will sway U.S. public opinion much. Everyone loves to be on the winning side."

The New York Times has published a detailed account of the deceptions perpetrated by African-American reporter Jayson Blair, who plagiarized other journalists' work and fabricated details of stories about topics including the DC sniper and the war in Iraq. The Blair scandal has prompted speculation that affirmative action got him special newsroom treatment on account of his race. Amy Alexander points out, however, journalism has plenty of "miscreants from the overwhelming white and male press corps." The real difference is that when white guys like Mike Barnicle, Stephen Glass and Bob Greene do something to besmirch journalism, they have often "managed to resurrect themselves following their supposed falls from grace. ... As usual, white men are the main beneficiaries of that particular perk."

"Washington has constructed a simple, heroic narrative of freedom and asked us to ignore the much messier human devastation and tragedies of this war," novelist Diana Abu-Jaber writes in the Washington Post of the U.S. war on Iraq. "There are angry outbursts against America across the Middle East, and most Americans have almost no idea why. ... Our news programming has been instrumental in the marketing of this war. ... When I said on one radio show that I've traveled throughout the Middle East as an American, with American friends, and have felt nothing from the Arabs but friendship and hospitality, I received an e-mail from one listener who wrote, 'Don't you know that Arabs hate us? It's all over the news.' Of course, if Arabs are systematically portrayed as an essentially hate-filled people, that makes the marketing of a very expensive war and occupation much easier to manage."

At the beginning of the war, an anonymous Iraqi calling himself "Salam Pax" was weblogging from Baghdad. The postings stopped for several weeks, but now he is back online, with a backlog of street-level stories about the war and its aftermath. "War sucks big time," he says. "Don't let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don't think about your 'imminent liberation' anymore." On the other hand, he is "really glad that we can now at least have hope for a new Iraq. ... The truth is, if it weren't for intervention this would never have happened. When we were watching the Saddam statue being pulled down, one of my aunts was saying that she never thought she would see this day during her lifetime."

In response to an article by Melody Petersen in the New York Times, "CNN said yesterday that Aaron Brown, its nighttime news anchor, would not go forward with plans to become host of a series of corporate-sponsored videos that look like news and are broadcast on public television stations. ... A Boca Raton, Fla., production company, WJMK, recently hired Mr. Brown and Walter Cronkite, the former CBS News anchor, to serve as the hosts of a program called the American Medical Review. Drug companies and other health care companies pay WJMK about $15,000 to have their companies or products featured in the videos, which are two to five minutes long and run between regular public television programming. ... WJMK markets other programs, including American Business Review and American Environmental Review, each with one of the newsmen as the host."

At the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina, more than a dozen earnest college students gathered for training in how to start their own conservative newspapers and opinion journals and how to pick fights with lefty bogeymen on the faculty and in student government. "By the end of the day, the student journalists were fired up for battle," writes John Johnson, "determined not only to change the tenor of notoriously liberal campus dialogues, but also, in the long run, to alter the basic makeup of the nation's professional news outlets. ... In the wake of Sept. 11 and the war on Iraq, seminars such as this one are brimming with recruits to the battle for the hearts and minds of America's college students."

Stephen Glass, the writer who was fired five years ago for fabricating facts in his stories, has declined to speak publicly about the incident - until now. This Sunday, "60 Minutes" will feature an interview with Glass, who is promoting a novel about his frauds, titled The Fabulist. "Glass uses only one real name - his own - in a fictionalized treatment of how he bamboozled the world as a 25-year-old New Republic writer who always seemed to have the most colorful scenes and the most perfect quotes," writes Howard Kurtz. "Perhaps fittingly, the other characters all have fake names." Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic's literary editor, commented that "even in his reckoning of his crimes, he seems incapable of nonfiction. It's unbelievable. This may be the first novel ever written for the sole purpose of avoiding fact-checking."

"Aaron Brown of CNN, Walter Cronkite and other broadcast journalists have been hired to appear in videos resembling newscasts that are actually paid for by drug makers and other health care companies, blurring the line between journalism and advertising. ... For years, local news stations, as part of their newscasts, have broadcast [video news releases (VNRs)] created by drug companies' public relations agencies -- a practice that critics equate to publishing unedited press releases. Now, production companies are expanding that marketing tactic to public television and the Web and using celebrity journalists to add to the videos' credibility. ... Critics of the news media say that the videos mislead viewers by packaging promotional material to look like news."

New York-based 5W PR counts as clients the Christian Coalition, the Zionist Organization of America, and Israel's Ministry of Tourism, according to O'Dwyer's PR Daily. Representatives from these organizations are apparently now working to derail Bush's "road map for peace." Democracy Now reports Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon is lobbying the U.S. Congress and Christian fundamentalists -- including Christian Coalition President Roberta Combs and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and Pat Robertson -- against the U.S. peace plan. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reports Elon is presenting a different plan that will call for the establishment of a Palestinian state in Jordan. Ha'aretz reports that Elon said: "What we are now seeing across the Muslim world is not a powerful surge of faith but the dying embers of Islam. ... Within a few years a Christian crusade against Islam will be launched, which will be the major event of this millennium."

The trade organization Professional Lawn Care Association of America wants "to create a positive message about the benefits of a well-maintained landscape." Landscape Management, a landscape and lawn care trade publication, writes that PLCAA is sponsoring a meeting next month to address "threatening issues" faced by the "Green Industry. ... These include issues pertaining to pesticide and fertilizer use, air pollution and water restrictions." PLCAA Vice President for Government Affairs Thomas Delaney recently told the PLCAA board of director, which includes representatives from lawn care business and the pesticide industry, that the "Green Industry and particularly the lawn care sector is under attack here in the United States and in Canada because of misinformation propagated by zealous activists."

Country radio station KKCS, part of the Clear Channel network, has suspended two disk jockeys for defying the station's ban on playing music by the Dixie Chicks. The Chicks were banned from many Clear Channel stations after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized President Bush. The station has received 200 calls from listeners, 75% of which want the ban lifted, but station manager says he gave the DJs "an alternative: stop it now and they'll be on suspension, or they can continue playing them and when they come out of the studio they won't have a job."

Paul Krugman asks "why is the failure to find any evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program, or vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons ... a big deal? Mainly because it feeds suspicions that the war wasn't waged to eliminate real threats. This suspicion is further fed by the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward those supposed threats once Baghdad fell. For example, Iraq's main nuclear waste dump wasn't secured until a few days ago, by which time it had been thoroughly looted. So was it all about the photo ops? Well, Mr. Bush got to pose in his flight suit. And given the absence of awkward questions, his handlers surely feel empowered to make even more brazen use of the national security issue in future."

"Media have been quick to declare the U.S. war against Iraq a success, but in-depth investigative reporting about the war's likely health and environmental consequences has been scarce," media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes. "Two important issues getting shortchanged in the press are the U.S.'s controversial use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons. According to a May 5 search of the Nexis database, there have been no in-depth reports about cluster bombs on ABC, CBS or NBC's nightly news programs since the start of the war. There have been, however, a few passing mentions of cluster bombs -- enough so that viewers may be aware of their existence. Not so with depleted uranium. Since the beginning of the year, the words 'depleted uranium' have not been uttered once on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News or NBC Nightly News, according to Nexis."

In the last of its investigative series the Washington Post reports on how a multi-billion dollar environmental charity takes care of its own. For example, "on New York's Shelter Island, the Nature Conservancy three years ago bought an undeveloped, 10-acre tract overlooking its Mashomack Preserve ... just a stone's skip from the exclusive Hamptons. Cost to the charity: $2.1 million. Seven weeks later, it resold the land, with some development restrictions, to James Dougherty, former chairman of the charity's regional chapter, and his wife, Nancy, a trustee at the Conservancy's preserve. Cost to the Doughertys: $500,000. ... Time and again, the nonprofit has bought raw land and resold it at a loss to a trustee or supporter."

Election campaign records following the past legislative session in Florida show that sugar and telephone companies both gave the most and got the most in return. Loosened pollution restrictions in the Everglades and an impending increase in telephone service rates, the largest in history, appear to be the payoff for more then $3.5 million the industries gave to state-level candidates and committees. "The two industries employed nearly 200 registered lobbyists during this year's legislative session - including former House speakers, former legislators, ex-Bush aides and well-connected political operatives," writes Peter Wallsten. "On their own, those lobbyists gave millions of dollars in campaign contributions."

"Burson-Marsteller is working to enhance the credibility of the Iraqi National Congress as it seeks to establish itself as a legitimate force in postinvasion Iraq," writes The Holmes Report, a PR trade publication. "B-M has been working with the Congress, led by highprofile Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, since 1999, under a state department contract. Chalabi and the Congress have close ties with the Bush administration, but some critics are concerned that their support within Iraq is shallow. 'We've been the communications vehicle on the outside as the INC moved into northern Iraq, then to Nasiriya, and to Baghdad,' K. Riva Levinson, who heads the INC account for Burson out of Washington, told reporters. 'We were helping the INC get out statements and videos that made clear that the exiled opposition was consolidating and moving. It's been a tremendous ride for them and for us.'"

The second part of the Post's examination of a multi-billion dollar tax exempt corporation: "Eight years ago, Mobil Oil gave the Nature Conservancy what was one of the group's largest corporate donations, a patch of prairie that encompassed the last native breeding ground of a highly endangered bird. ... The Conservancy ... started acting like an oil company. The Conservancy sank a well under the bird's nesting ground. Drilling in sensitive areas is opposed as destructive by most environmentalists. But the Conservancy subscribes to an aggressive form of 'compatible development,' a pragmatic approach that seeks to accommodate the needs of business as well as environmentalism. The Conservancy wanted the Texas City Prairie Preserve to be a national model to show that drilling can be accomplished without harming the environment. It would use the drilling profits to buy more habitat for the birds. That's not the way things worked out."

In the first of three articles the Washington Post takes a long look at the Nature Conservancy, "the world's richest environmental group, amassing $3 billion in assets by pledging to save precious places. ... Yet the Conservancy has logged forests, engineered a $64 million deal paving the way for opulent houses on fragile grasslands and drilled for natural gas under the last breeding ground of an endangered bird species. ... Its governing board and advisory council now include executives and directors from one or more oil companies, chemical producers, auto manufacturers, mining concerns, logging operations and coal-burning electric utilities. ... It is also the leading proponent of a brand of environmentalism that promotes compromise between conservation and corporate America."

A former State Department counterterrorism expert and crisis consulting CEO will step into the fray in Baghdad. Reuters reports L. Paul Bremer is replacing retired general Jay Garner as the top U.S. civilian official in postwar Iraq. Between 1986-89, Bremer served as President Ronald Reagan's ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, "a post that made him responsible for crafting U.S. policies to combat terrorism." After leaving the State Department, Bremer worked at Kissinger Associates, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's consulting firm. In 2002, Bremer was appointed to the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council. Bremer serves as chairman and CEO of the Crisis Consulting Practice of Marsh Inc. According to its website, Marsh's mission is "to create and deliver risk solutions and services that make our clients more successful." With an annual revenue of $5.9 billion, Marsh is active in more than 100 countries. According to Reuters, in a January Washington Times column entitled "Charting a course for war," Bremer wrote: "This fight cannot be won on the defensive ... So we must go on the offensive. To be blunt, we have to kill the terrorists before they kill us."

"In a city where image is everything ... the White House has created an indelible, and formidable, image by having Bush land aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to deliver a speech signaling the end of the military phase of the war with Iraq. ... The attention the event generated was a political consultant's dream, said Michael Deaver, who was President Ronald Reagan's White House image guru. ... Paul Begala, a former Clinton aide, called the flight a 'tax-subsidized commercial.' ... Navy officials were unable yesterday to provide the per-hour cost to operate two S-3B Vikings, one carrying the president and the other his chief of staff."

"Other presidents have had problems with truth-telling," write Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken. "But George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president." They detail the gap between words and deeds in Bush's policies on education, health and the environment. (Unfortunately, the article is inaccurately titled. Bennett and Pauken caught a few of the president's lies, but certainly not "all" of them.)