A major global public opinion survey suggests that trust in many key institutions has fallen to critical proportions. The survey of 36,000 people conducted by Gallup International and Environics International reveals a dramatic lack of trust in democratic institutions and global and large national companies; and trust is even low when it comes to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions and media organizations around the world. (Maybe people should just take the advice of PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, and Trust Us, We're Experts.)

"If and when a press corps of 3000 to 5000 lands with the U.S. military in Iraq, should they be prohibited from broadcasting the war live, using their videophones and satellite dishes? Yes, under some circumstances, says Nightline anchor Ted Koppel."

War correspondent Leon Daniel was puzzled by the lack of corpses at the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on Feb. 25, 1991. Clearly there had been plenty of killing on the previous day, which marked the beginning of the ground war in Operation Desert Storm. But there were no visible signs of carnage because the army had already plowed dirt over all of the bodies. "What happened at the Neutral Zone that day has become a metaphor for the conduct of modern warfare," writes Patrick Sloyan. "While political leaders bask in voter approval for destroying designated enemies, they are increasingly determined to mask the reality of warfare that causes voters to recoil. ... In manipulating the first and often most lasting perception of Desert Storm, the Bush administration produced not a single picture or video of anyone being killed. This sanitized, bloodless presentation by military briefers left the world presuming Desert Storm was a war without death."

"Do reporters know that so much medical news is actually unpaid advertising?" writes Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Policy Research for Women & Families. "The most effective industry influence is so well-hidden that many reporters and producers are totally unaware of it. The role of pharmaceutical companies and other health care industry interests in shaping news coverage of medical products and treatment is as invisible as it is pervasive."

"The House Committee on Government Reform, which is investigating reports of American children kidnaped and held in Saudi Arabia, has issued subpoenas to the Kingdom's top lobbying firms Qorvis Communications, Patton Boggs and the Gallagher Group demanding they turn over their PR and lobbying records," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "The Saudi Embassy claims those documents are protected under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations as 'archives and documents of the mission.'" Committee head Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) rejects that argument, noting that the Vienna Convention is "intended to protect foreign diplomats but has no application to American citizens 'who choose to sell their services as public relations/lobbying mouthpieces for foreign interests,'" O'Dwyer's reports. Saudi Arabia has spent more than $3 million to shape US opinion concerning the Kingdom. Meanwhile, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Saudi Arabia's Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, is accused of providing money to al-Qaida. In response, the princess says, "all I wanted to do was to give some help to someone in need."

"Nothing more starkly illustrates the federal government's post-Sept. 11 desire to learn more about its citizens and to divulge less about itself than the new homeland security legislation," write James Kuhnhenn and Drew Brown. "Approved by the Senate last week and destined for President Bush's signature, the bill would make it easier for government agencies to gather information about individuals and groups, including their e-mail, the phone calls they place, and the Web sites they view. At the same time, the bill would make it harder for people to obtain information about their government and would permit greater secrecy by government advisory groups."

In our book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, we reported on the U.S. government's disastrous PR campaign to build public support in Nevada for a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Now two workers at the Yucca Mountain Project to dispose of high-level nuclear waste say they were fired or transferred after raising concerns about the project's safety.

"Edelman PR Worldwide and Dittus Communications have been tapped to spearhead PR and lobbying for the American Council for Fitness and Nutrition, a coalition of top food and beverage groups seeking to counter charges that the industry is at fault for a swelling obesity problem in the U.S.," O'Dwyer's PR Daily writes. "Formed earlier this year, the Council stresses that both physical activity and a proper diet are needed for a healthy lifestyle. The group includes the American Frozen Food Institute, Kraft Foods, Chocolate Manufactuers Assn., Sugar Assn., Grocery Manufacturers of America, National Restaurant Assn., National Council of Chain Restaurants, and the Assn. of National Advertisers, among a handful of others."

"After the bubble burst, the [New York Stock Exchange] regulators decided that it was not nice for an analyst to tout a stock without mentioning that he owned the stock or that his employer was the company's investment banker. So they ruled that such conflicts had to be disclosed. Fair enough. But to whom? Many investors learn analysts' opinions not from reading brokerage reports but from news media reports. So the Big Board said that the firms had to make sure that broadcasters who quoted the analysts had to pass on the disclosure. The broadcasters said, in effect, what about the newspapers? And that is how the new rule came to be. ... The S.E.C. will decide which rule will be approved. Annette L. Nazareth, the commission's director of market regulation, ... voiced concern that if information on conflicts is not passed on by the news media, 'then we have achieved very little' by requiring disclosure. 'You'd think," she said, "that the same outlets that were saying what a terrible wrong was done to the public would want to cooperate.'"

"Dentists leafing through The Journal of the American Dental Association last May found a study concluding that a new drug called Bextra offered relief from one of their patients' worst nightmares - the acute pain that follows dental surgery. Federal regulators had rejected that conclusion only six months before, leaving Bextra's marketers, Pharmacia and Pfizer, hard pressed to sell it as an advance over Celebrex, their earlier entry in a crowded market for pain drugs. The new study helped light a fire under Bextra. Its sales soared 60 percent over the three months that followed ... . But the research was not conducted by academics. Instead, the lead investigators were from Scirex, a little-known research firm owned partly by Omnicom, one of the world's biggest advertising companies. Madison Avenue - whose television ads have helped turn prescription medicines like Viagra, Allegra and Vioxx into billion-dollar products - is expanding its role in the drug business, wading into the science of drug development. ... One advertising executive calls it 'getting closer to the test tube.'"

For years CBS (and all the other networks) have run fake news stories in the form of Video News Releases (VNRs). But now, CBS is also in the business of creating, producing and distributing VNRs. These phony news stories appear on TV networks and their affiliates, misleading viewers into thinking they are watching real news reports when in fact they are watching cleverly-disguised commercials designed to look just like real news. Thousands of VNRS are produced and aired every year. TV news directors save money by filling air time with these slanted, pseudo-news segments that stealthily promote clients' products and ideas. Now CBS has taken this outrage to a new level by entering the profitable business of selling, producing and distributing VNRs. A CBS Media Group advertisement in the current PR Week urges potential clients to hire CBS and "put one of the world's leading media companies to work for you" producing video news releases. CBS even guarantees "placement on the CBS Newspath VNR feed." Karen L. Kapnick, formerly an account manager with MediaLink, runs CBS's VNR business.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations hired APCO Worldwide to develop "positive U.S.-ASEAN ties." "President Bush has made establishing free trade agreements with each individual ASEAN nation a foreign policy priority," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "The U.S. Administration also counts on ASEAN support for its war on terrorism." Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Viet Nam, Thailand, Cambodia, Brunei and Myanmar are ASEAN member countries.

"Having spent more than $30 million to help elect their allies to Congress, the major drug companies are devising ways to capitalize on their electoral success by securing favorable new legislation and countering the pressure that lawmakers in both parties feel to lower the cost of prescription drugs, industry officials say. The industry's hand appears stronger now than at any other time in recent years, a result of its large donations to political parties and candidates and millions of dollars spent on television advertising by industry-financed groups." (The New York Times print version of this story noted that at least $15 million was spent on TV ads placed by drug industry front groups such as the United Seniors Association. For unknown reasons this information is not in the New York Times online version.)

If you happen to sound like you're older than 54, don't even bother calling in to any of the talk shows on Chicago's WLS-AM radio station. Michael Packer, operations manager of the ABC-owned news/talk station, sent a confidential memo to staffers ordering them to screen out "any old sounding callers" no matter what they have to say. (Maybe they're worried that old people can still remember a time when radio stations carried something other than rantings from right-wing gasbags.)

Wisconsin's huge deer herd is infected with chronic wasting disease (CWD), a deadly dementia that is a mad cow-type disease in deer, filling their brains with swiss cheese-like holes and plaque. The best available scientific evidence indicates that CWD, like British mad cow disease, could infect and kill humans. Rather than learn from Britain's mistakes and take a precautionary approach, Wisconsin has launched a PR and advertising campaign to belittle human health concerns and promote hunting. This week's deer hunt is a multi-billion dollar industry and sales of licenses fund the state's Department of Natural Resources. Milwaukee Magazine tells the disturbing story of the state's PR cover-up. Wisconsin state epidemiologist James Kazmierczak says "you could live on a diet of deer brains and never get sick." While state officials give false and misleading assurances to the public, the deaths of young venison eaters from the human equivalent of CWD seems on the rise.

By stating time and again that terrorism insurance is a jobs bill, the White House "delivered a big plum to the insurance industry," writes Steven Rosenfeld. Now taxpayers are obligated to cover the industry's back by paying up to $300 billion if another terrorism attack occurs -- even though there's no evidence that the legislation will protect a single worker's job. "It has nothing to do with reality," the former top federal insurance regulator said earlier this fall, when discussing his studies examining the issue. "It was hype back then and it's still hype."

PR Watch has posted previous reports on the biotech food industry's use of the Internet to fake independent criticism of anti-GM groups. Now George Monbiot, who has also reported on deceptive biotech practices, takes a look at recent efforts to use hunger in Africa as a marketing hook for genetically modified foods.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has joined a number of other health and science leaders in questioning the integrity of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology (RTP), a "seemingly independent scientific journal" that hides "its authors' and editors' extensive financial ties to tobacco, chemical, pharmaceutical, and other industries. ... [M]any RTP papers are written by scientists from industry labs or by industry-paid lawyers and lobbyists. The same industries might then use RTP articles in court to help derail lawsuits, or to make the case for less regulation in legislative- and executive-branch proceedings."

Alessandra Stanley writes in today's New York Times: "The revelation that Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, the self-proclaimed fair and balanced news channel, secretly gave advice to the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks was less shocking than it was liberating -- a little like the moment in 1985 when an ailing Rock Hudson finally explained that he had AIDS. Ever since Mr. Ailes changed jobs from Republican strategist to news executive, he has demanded to be treated as an unbiased journalist, not a conservative spokesman. But the cable channel he controls has an undisguised ideological agenda, which has made his protestations a bit puzzling. All along, the Fox motto 'fair and balanced' was less a newsroom mantra than the kind of first-strike media strategy that worked so well for the Republican Party when Mr. Ailes was advising the first Bush administration. ... By tirelessly insisting that all other cable or network news organizations are driven by a liberal bias, Mr. Ailes casts his own network as the centrist voice of reason. ... Mr. Ailes is so allergic to the label of former Republican strategist that he once urged a reporter for The New York Times who was seeking his views to exclude any mention of his work for Ronald Reagan or George Bush because it was 'irrelevant.' " PR Watch has reported how Roger Ailes, on behalf of Monsanto, censored Fox TV journalists Jane Akre and Steve Wilson for attempting to report on Monsanto's genetically engineered milk hormone BGH. Although Jane Akre won a jury verdict against Fox, the network has appealed.

Phil Leggiere tries to separate fact from conspiracy theory as he examines the historic ties between Nazi Germany and Prescott Bush, Dubya's grandfather, whose business dealings were "aiding and abetting the Nazi cause for profit long after the nature of the Nazi regime became clear to any informed observer, and even after the US declaration of war against Germany. ... It's clear Harriman, Bush, Dulles and legions of the financial elite share a degree of (largely unacknowledged) responsibility for providing Hitler and the Nazis the wherewithal to launch World War Two and the Holocaust." However, "There are sharp distinctions between the 'Bush is a Nazi' vulgarizations of the conspiranoia-ists, and the documented corporate-Nazi connections. ... The theorists who see this historical episode not as evidence of Nazism but of business-as-usual are clearly the more sophisticated of the bunch."

"Embarrassing public disclosures about Citigroup threaten to complicate final negotiations aimed at cleaning up tainted Wall Street research and stock-offering practices," reports Thor Valdmanis. "Top lawyers from Wall Street investment banks are under orders to demand that securities regulators give firm assurances that the industry will be spared further damaging revelations in return for signing on to a sweeping reform package being discussed this afternoon at the New York Stock Exchange." The latest damaging revelation suggests that Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill overestimated the value of AT&T stock for reasons that "appear to have been self-interested." Small investors who relied on AT&T's inflated valuation lost billions of dollars.

Last year PR Watch noted that since 9/11 Hollywood is working with the White House on US global propaganda efforts. Apparently some in Hollywood see film censorship as part of their patriotic duty. The New York Times reported this October that "a cataclysmic event can change the fate of a movie. One example is The Quiet American, the ... adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel. ... Miramax executives worried ... [it] ...could be seen as a searing critique of United States imperialism. The Quiet America was quietly shelved." Today's New York Times reports that thanks to the intercession of the movie's star Michael Caine, The Quiet American will be heard and seen in time for Oscar consideration. " 'The Quiet American isn't anti-American,' Sir Michael [Caine] said. 'It's anti the Americans who got the country involved in the Vietnam War.' "

The latest group of cheerleaders for war with Iraq, named the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, is meeting today in the White House with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. (Rice had an oil tanker named in her honor, a special gift of the Chevron company on whose board of directors she served.) The New York Times reports that the "hawkish" group "formed with the White House's tacit approval" is looking for additional funding for its propaganda effort which will include "making contacts with journalists, holding dinner sessions with administration officials and meeting with editorial boards" around the country. Fronting for the pro-war propaganda campaign are such notables as Bob Kerrey, George Shultz, James Hoffa and Newt Gingrich. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman "are expected to be the group's honorary Congressional co-chairmen."

"The model for me for someone in the public relations business is, to a certain extent, the U.S. military," journalist and Watergate legend Bob Woodward said in a keynote address to the Public Relation's Society of America's National Capital Chapter in Washington, D.C. PRSA's Strategist reports how Woodward, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, defines the model PR professional. "The best sources for straight information were people in the U.S. military, particularly the officers and men and women who had served in Vietnam, who learned the lessons of Vietnam -- that you cannot let the distance between what the reality is and what you are saying to exist at all."

"If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you," warns William Safire. "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend - all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as 'a virtual, centralized grand database.' To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you - passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance - and you have the supersnoop's dream: a 'Total Information Awareness' about every U.S. citizen. This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks." According to Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, Poindexter's proposed Total Information Awareness system "could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America."

The Homeland Defense Bill currently working its way through Congress adds a new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act, protecting the secrecy of information that companies submit voluntarily to the government. Supporters say the exemption makes it easier for companies to share information with the government to assist the "war on terrorism." Critics, like Rep. Janice Schakowsky, say the exemption creates "a loophole big enough to drive any corporation and its secrets through," They say companies will misuse the exemption to hide misdeeds and protect themselves from negligence lawsuits.

"'Word got around the department that I was a good Arabic translator who did a great Saddam imitation,' recalls the Harvard grad student. 'Eventually, someone phoned me, asking if I wanted to help change the course of Iraq policy,'" writes Asia Times (Hong Kong) correspondent Ian Urbina. "So twice a week, for US$3,000 a month, the Iraqi student says, under condition of anonymity, that he took a taxi from his campus apartment to a Boston-area recording studio rented by the Rendon Group, a DC-based public relations firm with close ties to the US government. His job: translate and dub spoofed Saddam Hussein speeches and tongue-in-cheek newscasts for broadcast throughout Iraq."

"Did you see the cover story of Newsweek magazine last week? The cover story is titled, 'Why TV is Good for Kids.' Why, against all common sense, is Newsweek going to try and convince us that television is good for kids?" write Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy. "Well, one reason might be: Newsweek is owned by the Washington Post Company, which owns a sprawling cable company and six broadcast stations around the country. Of course, nowhere in the article does Newsweek tell us this. And how does Newsweek try and convince us that TV is good for kids? They trot out an expert, Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology a the University of Massachusetts, who claims that TV is good for kids. But what Newsweek doesn't tell us is Anderson is a paid consultant to a variety of television networks and advertising interests. His clients include: NBC, CBS, Universal Pictures, Sony, General Mills, the Leo Burnett ad agency, Nickelodeon and the National Association of Broadcasters."

"The Forest Products Industry National Labor Management Committee, a group that says it wants to 'balance economic and environmental concerns' when it comes to managing America's timber, paid Ogilvy PR Worldwide $100,000 during the first-half of this year to make its case in Washington, D.C.," O'Dwyer's PR Daily writes. The group lobbied against EPA regulations on new industrial emissions. "The Committee members include the American Forest & Paper Assn., and forest industry groups in California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Louisiana and the Rockies. It also counts the International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, United Mine Workers, and Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Assn."

As we explain in our book Mad Cow USA, billions of pounds of rendered by-product from slaughterhouse waste are fed to livestock each year in the US. This is the practice that spread 'mad cow disease' in British cattle, a disease that has now spread to humans and is killing a growing number each year. The US has its own versions of mad cow-type diseases including chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk. CWD has apparently been spread across North America the past decade via the exponential growth of game farms and the feeding of rendered by-product as mineral and protein supplement to grow big antlers on both farmed and wild animals. The US has allowed tens of thousands of road kill deer to be rendered annually and fed back to pigs, pets and poultry (and to cows and deer previous to 1997). Finally the FDA is taking a step to limit this practice, but that step remains too little and too late. The FDA takes its lead from the US livestock industry and is protecting the continued feeding of billions of pounds of rendered by-product each year in the US. Until the US implements the same strict ban on feeding rendered by-products that has been imposed in Europe, the threat remains of CWD and other US mad cow-type diseases spreading to livestock and people. To follow this issue visit MadDeer.org.

For the past two decades, the U.S. Army has been shipping out career officers for a year-long PR training at the Pittsburgh office of global PR firm Ketchum, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. "The two sides were paired through a call from the Pentagon. It seems someone thought it would be a good idea to get public relations training," the Post-Gazette's Teresa F. Lindeman writes. Several program alumni told the paper that "crisis communications and media relations tools have come in especially handy since leaving Ketchum." Don McGrath completed the program in 1990 to became a Pentagon press spokesman for the chief of staff of the Army. "By 1991, the U.S. air attack began, and [McGrath] needed everything he knew to cope with the almost overwhelming media invasion," Lindeman writes. McGrath is now vice president of corporate communications for BASF Corp. in New Jersey.

"The White House is shifting James Wilkinson, who helped run the U.S./U.K. coalition communications office in the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan, to the Pentagon's U.S. Central Command to serve as spokesperson for Gen. Tommy Franks," O'Dwyer's PR Daily writes. "That move is a 'big signal' that the U.S. is 'getting serious' about Iraq, according to a report in The Washington Times. Wilkinson has just returned from a trip to Morocco, where he practiced his Arabic language skills on the streets. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used Wilkinson as his spokesperson during the presidential transition period."

The judge in celebrity thief Winona Ryder's shoplifting conviction has ordered that no juror speak publicly about the case for 90 days to lessen their ability to profit from appearances and interviews. Columnist George Hesselberg notes that "no juror in a movie star case would talk for free, so that means until three months are up, we won't get to know what really happened. But I was not a juror, so here is what really happened: A millionaire tried to steal some expensive clothes and got caught. She will not go to jail, even though it is suspected she has done this before. Meanwhile, not one media outlet or Web page noted the irony that elsewhere in California, victims of the 'three-strikes and you're out' rule are spending years, even lives, in prison for stealing less."

"The US Army is considering a proposal to privatize more than 200,000 jobs, a move that could displace thousands of public affairs officers worldwide - and yield a wealth of opportunity for private firms," PR Week's Douglas Quenqua writes. "The privatization plan is part of an effort to concentrate more of the Army's resources on fighting terrorism and to comply with a directive, issued by President Bush last year, that all government agencies must farm out work not deemed 'inherently governmental.' If approved, the plan would create the largest transfer ever of government jobs over to the private sector."

Former CNN correspondent Peter Arnett is angling to return to Iraq before the war starts this winter, writes Michael Wolff. This time, however, Arnett is freelancing for CameraPlanet, an indie news-production unit. Wolff sees Arnett as the last of a dying breed, as real war correspondents disappear and are replaced by famous talking heads like Geraldo Rivera or Christiane Amanpour. "As it happens, he is oddly able to do this, and all the other glamour-pusses are able to position themselves in the war picture, too, because nobody really does now what war reporters used to do. Nobody is covering combat -- nobody is in combat. Armies, after all, don't invite reporters along to battle anymore; and the point about digitized combat is that there is nothing but an explosion (recorded by gun cams) to cover; and, what's more, highly paid famous people are not, as a rule, able to endure great discomfort."

Getting caught in a scandal isn't necessarily bad for a public official's career these days. "Many in business - as well as old Washington hands - who have had their names tarnished and reputations sullied have discovered that there is life in the private sector after public disgrace, and a potentially profitable one at that," reports Leslie Wayne. "Many corporations are willing to overlook an ethical lapse or a subpar performance and put those with Washington expertise on their boards, to use them as lobbyists or to make them partners in business deals." For example:

• Robert L. Livingstone, who resigned from Congress after confessing to adultery, now is one of Washington's most sought-after lobbyists.
• "Bob Packwood, a Republican from Oregon who resigned in disgrace in 1995 after an ethics committee unanimously found he had forced himself on nearly two dozen women in his office, including a 17-year old intern. Mr. Packwood reported lobbying income of $1.4 million in 2000 and his client list includes Northwest Airlines, United Airlines and Verizon Communications."
• Former Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, a Chicago Democrat who served time in prison for misuse of public funds, was subsequently named to the board of American Ecology, a radioactive- and hazardous waste services company. "His opinions on tax issues ... appear on the op-ed pages of major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal."
• "Michael K. Deaver, who was chief of staff in the Reagan White House, is now one of Washington's most powerful public relations executives; he heads the Washington office of Edelman Public Relations. His conviction on felony perjury charges in 1987 for lying to Congress and to a federal grand jury, and a suspended prison sentence, matter not at all."

Computer experts say Microsoft's "Palladium" software project, which builds on technology being developed by the "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance" (TCPA), could be misused to gain unprecedented access to personal computers and endanger freedom of speech. TCPA could potentially allow courts, governments and corporations to remotely delete and censor files they deem offensive. Microsoft claims that Palladium will offer better security to end users, which draws scoffs from observers who find it ironic that "the company responsible for nearly every major computer security problem, virus, and backdoor ... is now heralding its ability to make everything better." "Trusted Computing" is also featured prominently in a new website concerned with "issues, particularly those related to personal computer use, which threaten to bring us closer to the dystopian nightmare of George Orwell's novel, 1984."

"More than 14 PR groups have been meeting informally to coordinate a new plan in support of PR's role," reports O'Dwyer's PR Daily. David Drobis, chairman of Ketchum, outlined the plan to improve the industry's tarnished image. "Early next year," he said, "they will come together in an effort to provide industry positioning on three critical topics: ethics, disclosure and transparency."

The Susan G. Komen Foundation and its fundraiser, the 5K Race for the Cure, have done much to raise awareness of breast cancer. Grassroots breast cancer advocates, however, are offended by the annual event, according to journalist Mary Ann Swissler in an in-depth article on the Komen Foundation for Southern Exposure Magazine. "The races, [critics] say, merely focus women on finding a medical cure for breast cancer, and away from environmental conditions causing it, the problems of the uninsured, and political influence of corporations over the average patient," Swissler writes. She uncovers Komen's direct connections with the pharmaceutical industry, corporate boards of private cancer treatment companies, habitual polluters, conservative lobbyists and George W. Bush as well as Komen's active support of an HMO-friendly version of the "Patients' Bill of Rights."

PR Tactics, a publication of the Public Relations Society of America, reports corporate budgets for public relations average $2.7 million in 2002, an increase from $2.25 in 2001. The Thomas L. Harris/Impulse Research Client Survey found that telecommunications firms outspend other sectors, averaging $8.04 million for PR budgets. Chemicals and plastics average $5.55 million; retailing, $3.96 million; energy, $3.68 million; and sports and entertainment, $3.52 million. Some of the PR spending goes to promoting new products. PR Tactics reports "a recent survey of 600 U.S. companies found that 87 percent of them introduced a new name for a product, service, or company in the last two years. ... Two-thirds reported that creating a new name was more difficult than in the past, perhaps given the influx of new monikers. What may surprise, however, was that 43 percent ... said they do not use research to test new names."

"What are they thinking? GM's 'Introducing the Saturn VUE' ad, which ran in Newsweek magazine, compares their new SUV to endangered arctic species," the public interest group CorpWatch writes. "Never mind that SUVs produce carbon emissions that contribute to the global warming that's melting polar ice floes like the one pictured in their ad. And never mind that General Motors vehicles alone account for about 1.65% of the world's carbon emissions -- a significant amount for a single company. GM's publicists seem unfazed that most of the animals pictured in the ad are negatively impacted by climate change or that the arctic region is particularly vulnerable to global warming. They have the chutzpah to tell us their SUV is 'at home in almost any environment.' And that seems like a perfect reason to bestow them with a Greenwash Award."

"President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't," writes Eric Alterman.

Veteran journalist Helen Thomas is angered by the Bush administration's "bullying drumbeat" of war. "Where is the outrage?" she said in a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Where is Congress? They're supine! Bush has held only six press conferences, the only forum in our society where a president can be questioned. I'm on the phone to [press secretary] Ari Fleischer every day, asking will he ever hold another one? The international world is wondering what happened to America's great heart and soul. ... I do not absolve the press. We've rolled over and played dead, too."

"The Public Relations Society of America, the Arthur Page Society, the Institute for PR, the Council of PR Firms and the PA Council are on the wrong side of the Nike 'commercial speech' lawsuit," writes Jack O'Dwyer, publisher of the O'Dwyer's PR trade publications. "Instead of siding with Nike, which refuses to defend the truthfulness of its statements about labor practices abroad (see No Logo for labor conditions in 18 foreign countries), the PR groups should be demanding that accuracy be served. The California Supreme Court ruled that Nike was promoting sales and thus did not have the protection civilians have in making statements."

"The Clash's 'London Calling, with its lyrical images of nuclear winter, looming ice age and engine failure, might seem a particularly annoying musical choice for selling an elite brand of cars. But for Jaguar, the 1979 song was the perfect accompaniment to the television commercials for its new X-Type car. Jaguar is not the only company blithely using songs whose lyrics come off as downright contrary to the images of the brands they advertise. ... 'On its face, it's preposterous...' said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University. ... But it probably works, Mr. Miller said, adding, 'Their hope is that as people drive their Jaguars, they'll feel like outlaws.' ... The success of advertisers with these ads suggests that making radical songs saccharine is actually easy. 'Meaning is extremely malleable,' said Gary Burns, professor of communication... 'If it's a good riff, people are going to listen to it,' even in a commercial, said Jason Fine, senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine. 'It doesn't particularly bother me or steal the song's meaning from me. I know a lot of people do feel that way, but that's become an outdated way of thinking.' "

Veteran war reporter Chris Hedges has written a book examining the continuing appeal of war to the human psyche. "The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation," he writes. He discusses the myths that accompany war in an interview with TomPaine.com: "Once you enter a conflict, or at the inception of a conflict, you are given a language by which you speak. The state gives you a language to speak and you can't speak outside that language or it becomes very difficult. There is no communication outside of the cliches and the jingos: 'The War on Terror,' 'Showdown With Iraq,' 'The Axis of Evil,' all of this stuff. So that whatever disquiet we feel, we no longer have the words in which to express it. ... People lose individual conscience for this huge communal enterprise. ... It will, unfortunately, take that grim harvest of dead, that ultimately those that are intoxicated with war must always swallow, for us to wake up again."

Jeff Seideman, president of the Boston chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, is publicly disagreeing with the PRSA's stance on the Nike vs. Kasky lawsuit, in which Nike is being sued for allegedly making false statements about its overseas labor practices. "Actually, PRSA shouldn't be on either side of the issue," Seideman writes. It should have taken a position in support of ethical practices by PR professionals." Nike and the PRSA claim the First Amendment protects their right to make false statements about corporate social responsibility. Seideman retorts: "It seems hypocritical to me for our Society, which has recently embraced cause and social responsibility campaigns as legitimate marketing strategies (despite my personal belief that they are ineffective gimmicks) to claim that Nike is not engaged in commercial speech when it claims its labor practices are socially responsible. Social responsibility campaigns are a form of reputation management and reputation management is designed to directly, or indirectly, positively affect the bottom line. ... The greatest problem facing our profession today is our lack of credibility. ... We only made it worse last year when we eviscerated the enforcement provisions of our Code of Ethics. ... What a shame that the leading professional society of a profession already burdened by doubts about its credibility, would side with those who claim their public statements don't have to be truthful."

Pakistan's recent contract with Stirling Consulting for "media relations" work will include dealing with negative media stories, "stimulating" pro-Pakistan letters-to-the-editor, and enlisting Pakistani-American "message surrogates," Working for Change columnist Bill Berkowitz writes. "Recruiting 'message surrogates' is a classic example of what in PR lingo is called 'the third party technique,'" PR Watch's Sheldon Rampton told Berkowitz. "Hiding a client's message behind someone else's face -- putting a scripted message in the mouths of seemingly independent spokespeople -- is a major example of a deceptive PR campaign," Rampton added.

Are Berman & Co., flacks for the tobacco, restaurant and booze industries who specialize in attacking groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Greenpeace, preparing to launch a new front group called "Tarnish the Halo?" Or are they just looking for new recruits for their on-going smear campaigns? We wonder because they've posted a job advertisement seeking a researcher. "The food police want us arrested," the ad states. "The animal-rights movement wants us thrown to the lions. Green scaremongers want to slap us with mandatory warning labels. We just want to tell the truth." For examples of the lies these guys tell when they "tell the truth," read our profile of Berman & Co. in the Impropaganda Review.

"We know that secrecy by its very nature may affect the personality of its practioners," wrote the still-secret author of a 1977 secret study by the CIA, which noted that these "unintended psychological effects ... seem to diminish rather than enhance security." The author, whose study was finally declassified last month, pointed to the example of Pearl Harbor: "That most disastrous of intelligence failures was due in no small measure to the mishandling of compartmented intelligence. The dissemination of decrypted Japanese communications ... was so restricted that the theater commanders in Hawaii did not regularly receive them." For more recent examples, look at the failures of intelligence information-sharing prior to September 11 or the DC sniper case, which also shows that too much secrecy can hinder an investigation. "In the end, it was television reports of information that was not released by the police -- the type of car and license plate of the sniper suspects -- that helped crack the case," observes Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz.

"As soon as the results of Tuesday's mid-term elections are known, a small group of influential right-wing hawks with close ties to the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney will launch a new political campaign to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq," writes Jim Lobe. "The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which is setting up its office on Capitol Hill this week, plans to announce its formal launch next week, according to its president, Randy Scheunemann, a veteran Republican Senate foreign-policy staffer who until recently worked as a consultant to Rumsfeld on Iraq policy. The Committee appears to be a spin-off of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a front group consisting mainly of neo-conservative Jews and heavy-hitters from the Christian Right, whose public recommendations on fighting the 'war against terrorism' and U.S. backing for Israel in the conflict in the occupied territories have anticipated to a remarkable degree the administration's own policy course."

"Documentarian Michael Moore has once again used a personal appeal over the internet to boost the success of his controversial work, highlighting the effectiveness of the web as a promotional tool," PR Week reports. Encouraging people to see his new movie "Bowling for Columbine," Moore's email was sent to thousands on his mailing list and "was widely circulated, especially by film buffs and political activists who support Moore." Moore's movie features PR representatives from Lockheed's Littleton, CO missile plant and K-Mart corporate headquarters. PR Week reports "Bowling for Columbine" is now showing on over 110 screens and has grossed $2.6 million.

The Panama Canal Authority has a $1 million contract with Edelman PR Worldwide for "corporate communications" work, O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. Edelman has "conducted a communications audit, provided media training, monitored the worldwide media and drafted materials for the United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development for the PCA." The 88-year-old canal is in need of modernization, which could cost up to $8 billion. "U.S. officials also fear the Canal could be a terror target, a strike that would deal a severe blow to global commerce," O'Dwyer's writes.

Award-winning journalist Gary Webb was hung out to dry by his newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, after writing "Dark Alliance," which showed how the CIA and drug dealers fueled the epidemic of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s. As the first Internet-based expose in journalism history, it was seen by millions worldwide, but caused such a firestorm of controversy that the paper's editor later apologized and shut down the website to keep the stories from ever being seen again. Now Webb has posted the stories on his own web site, along with other materials related to the story and its aftermath.

Food industry front group Consumer Freedom, run by tobacco lobbyist Rick Berman, is doing its best to confuse the public and the press about chronic wasting disease (CWD), a mad cow-type disease spreading across North America. Berman's lobby group has been savaging us for writing our 1997 book Mad Cow USA and for continuing to investigate and comment on this issue. Berman claims that what has been dubbed 'mad deer disease' is just the result of our devious marketing conspiracy to panic the public into buying our book. Nice try, but fortunately not many are buying Berman's misinformation campaign. In fact there has been some excellent reporting picking up where our book left off, most recently an investigative series in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Five years after car industry and other lobbyists killed US ratification of the Kyoto treaty, a minimal effort to limit climate change, the General Motors corporation is selling its 11-miles-per-gallon Hummer. The company can barely keep up with surging American demand for the $50,000 behemoth, a version of a US military vehicle popularized during the first Iraq War. According to Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, marketing guru to the auto industry, "People told me, 'I can protect my family. If someone bumps into me, they're dead.' People love that feeling." After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, "we feel we are at war and people feel the need to be protected." Environmental activists mistakenly claimed a victory in 2000 when General Motors belatedly dropped out of the Global Climate Coalition, the successful industry front group that fought off fuel efficiency mandates and climate protection in the 1990s. GM's PR has portrayed itself as a responsible, environmentally aware builder of "Earth Friendly" vehicles. Environmental foundations have probably donated more than a hundred million dollars in the past five years to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, National Environmental Trust, Greenpeace and other groups working on the climate issue, with no visible progress or real victories.

OMB Watch, a nonprofit organization that monitors the White House Office of Management and Budget, has issued a working paper titled "The Bush Administration's Secrecy Policy: A Call to Action to Protect Democratic Values."

A new website ranks big corporations according to such issues as whether they treat women fairly, how they impact the environment, and if they make nuclear arms. Created by Dan Porter, of Portland, ME, www.idealswork.com six gathers the information from a the Investor Responsibility Research Center.

"If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action. This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool," writes David Corn. Most Americans, however, won't agree with the agenda of the Workers World Party, which organized the recent anti-war demonstration in Washington. The WWP is a "small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956" and which today supports North Korean dictator Kim Jon-Il and former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. "The anti-war movement won't have a chance of applying pressure on the political system unless it becomes much larger and able to squeeze elected officials at home and in Washington," Corn writes. "To reach that stage, the new peace movement will need the involvement of labor unions and churches. That's where the troops are o in the pews, in the union halls. How probable is it, though, that mainstream churches and unions will join a coalition led by the we-love-North-Korea set?"

"Gordon Andrew, who has held top communications posts at Prudential and Travelers Group, is handling the press for former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow, who was indicted on 78 counts of fraud, money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice," reports O'Dwyer's. Andrew previously worked as head of communications at the Travelers Group during its infamous "Boom-Boom Room" lawsuit, the first in a series of Wall Street sexual harassment scandals.

Speakers at a recent symposium of the Public Relations Society of America said that "U.S. support for Israelis over Palestinians, President Bush's 'crusade' against the Taliban and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia contribute to the rising anti-American sentiment in the Middle East," reports O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "According to Denise Gray-Felder, VP of communications for the Rockefeller Foundation, 'Americans persist in operating like a nation of ignorants.' She has noticed in her international travels that foreigners are far better educated on world affairs than U.S. peers. She attributes this to a cutback in U.S. media coverage of foreign news" -- occurring, ironically, at the same time that growing U.S. military interventions spawn resentment abroad: "America is increasingly seen as an 'imperial power' as more and more U.S. troops are stationed around the world."