The British wing of the Save the Children charity was ordered to stop critizing the U.S.-led coalition's military occupation of Iraq, after it issued a statement saying that "lack of cooperation from the coalition forces is a breach of the Geneva conventions and its protocols, but more importantly the time now being wasted is costing children their lives." Kevin Maguire reports that the incident exposed "tensions within an alliance that describes itself as 'the world's largest independent global organisation for children' but which is heavily reliant on governments and big business for cash."

For the past fifteen years the editors of Utne magazine have chosen Utne Independent Press Award winners in a number of publishing categories including newsletters. PR Watch has won this award in the past, and has again been nominated this year. Other nominees in the category are some of our own favorites including Counterpunch, Connection to the Americas, and The Hightower Lowdown. We're honored to be in such company. Chances are that you don't subscribe to PR Watch, so you only see archived issues. Please, to keep our award winning quarterly going, we need your support as a subscribing member. Click here and receive PR Watch by first class mail four times a year.

The Bush Administration has been doing its best to paint a happy face on the Iraq occupation but reality keeps getting in the way. The New York Times reports today that even in Mosul, a city 'once so promising,' the current American military 'crackdown is draining away much of the goodwill that remains.' Earlier this month a leaked CIA report warned that resistance to the US occupation is growing among ordinary Iraqis, leading to a new US plan to speed up transfer of power to Iraqis. But the plan 'to turn over power in Iraq more quickly was thrown into disarray on Wednesday when the country's most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made public his opposition to a proposal for indirect elections.' How bad has it gotten for the Bush Administration? Even long-time CIA and Pentagon operative Ahmad Chalabi is accusing Bush of letting his re-election concerns determine policy in Iraq, saying 'The whole thing was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October [2004] for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government. When you work backwards from that, you understand the dates the Americans were insisting on.' " President Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit in Iraq with 600 soldiers lasted less than a few hours, including a very brief meeting with Chalabi, under severe secrecy for his own security.

"It's popular to say that corporate globalization is war by other means, but what went down in Miami during the FTAA skipped the part about other means," Rebecca Solnit writes for tomdispatch.com. "And though it was most directly ... an assault on the bodies of protestors, it was first an assault against the right of the people peaceably to assemble and other first amendment rights, a dramatic example of how hallowed American rights are being dismantled in the name of the war on terrorism. For months beforehand, Police Chief John Timoney ... had portrayed protestors as terrorists and the gathering in Miami as a siege of the city." Not only were the public and media frightened by Timoney's depiction of the planned protests, "[t]here's little doubt that the police themselves buy the propaganda," Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman write. Having been thoroughly indoctrinated on threat posed by protestors and emboldened with new quasi-military equipment, "the police were, to say the least, overeager to lunge at protesters," Mokhiber and Weissman write. "After last week, no one should call what Timoney runs in Miami a police force," Democracy Now! producer Jeremy Scahill writes. It's a paramilitary group. ... The forces fired indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed protesters. Scores of people were hit with skin-piercing rubber bullets; thousands were gassed with an array of chemicals. On several occasions, police fired loud concussion grenades into the crowds. Police shocked people with electric tazers. Demonstrators were shot in the back as they retreated."

The United States is supposed to be a democracy, but today powerful business interests dominate government, most citizens don't even vote, civil liberties are surrendered for national security, gunboat diplomacy alienates world opinion, and one overtly pro-business party dominates all three branches of government and the news media. What's going on, and what can be done? PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are working on a new book, titled Banana Republicans: How the New Right is Turning American Into a One-Party State. We welcome your help! Please visit our Disinfopedia and add your own research on the Republican political machine.

"If not for sixteen specious words about African uranium, George W. Bush's post-war PR would be humming along," declares Sam Gwynne in a mostly gushing profile of Dan Bartlett, the Bush administration's director of communications. Gwynne depicts Bartlett as an affable Texas good ol' boy who gets "the spit knocked out of him with alarming regularity by the velociraptors of the media," while acknowledging that he is "the linchpin of the most far-reaching, tough-minded, and technologically advanced government communications operation in history - one whose sophistication, sweep, and scope make even the silken spinners of the Reagan era seem primitive by comparison."

Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Channel's primetime debate show, figures prominently in the network's campaign to market its right-leaning programming as "fair & balanced." Actually, the program exemplifies the way Fox jiggers the balance to favor conservatives. "The show pairs the aggressive conservative Sean Hannity with the mildly liberal, often conciliatory Alan Colmes," writes Steve Rendall, in "a format where conservatives out-number, out-talk and out-interrupt their liberal opponents." Moreover, Colmes "seems to see his role as one of policing liberal excess," actually taking conservative positions on many issues and rushing to the support of conservative figures such as Rudy Giuliani, Trent Lott and Rush Limbaugh. "Colmes appears to have no goal other than to maintain the illusion of debate on a univocal network," Rendall states.

James R. Wilkson ran the White House Coalition Information Center for "the war against terrorism" and also served as top PR strategist for General Tommy Franks during the US attack on Iraq. Most recently he has been been planning the 2004 Republican convention to be held in New York city coinciding with the third anniversary of the 9/11 terror attack. A White House press release today announces that he will soon be back in the White House with a couple of new titles: "Deputy Assistant to the President" and "Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications."

The director of "The Reagans" complained Monday that CBS butchered his made-for-TV movie, ultimately making it too incoherent for the network to air. According to Robert Ackerman, CBS expressed no problems until after a "rough cut" was hurriedly delivered in October. At that point, the network ordered changes to the dialogue that were "nonnegotiable," he said. "What they were doing with the structure of the film, I thought, was making it incoherent," Ackerman said. However, CNN reports, "The film Showtime is airing Sunday is exactly as the filmmakers intended -- with the major exception of excising the one line that caused the most hubbub."

Paris Hilton has hired Dan Klores Communications, a PR firm that specializes in "crisis communications" for celebrities embroiled in scandals, to help her cope with the fallout over public circulation of a videotape featuring her having sex with a boyfriend. The videotape has sparked a media frenzy, but New York Times columnist John Leland jokes that the only thing that could really "damage her reputation as a vapid, self-involved rich girl" would be a videotape showing her doing something worthwhile with her life, such as "developing mathematical models for a low-cost irrigation system to be used in the developing world. ... Few celebrities have worked as hard at pure tabloid notoriety, or built reputations so unsullied by accomplishment or circumspection. Since she was the subject of a Vanity Fair profile in 2000, Ms. Hilton, whose great-grandfather Conrad Hilton started the Hilton hotel chain, has been seized upon by gossip columnists as a chance to construct a celebrity from scratch, using only the raw clay of her wealth and indiscretion. Though she has done little more than go to nightclubs, her name has appeared in more than 90 New York Post articles this year alone." The release of the sex video prompted a lawsuit by the guy she was boffing, but observers think the furor will goose viewership of her new TV show on Fox, "A Simple Life."

"The Pentagon took another step in distancing the media from US casualties of war last week with the announcement of new restrictions on funeral coverage at Arlington National Cemetery (ANC)," PR Week's Douglas Quenqua reports. "Any reporter wanting to cover a soldier's funeral at the Virginia cemetery will now be required to stay within a distant, roped-off area. This 'bullpen' is described as an area far enough away from the proceedings that a clergyman or family member's words cannot be clearly heard. The new restrictions come on the heels of a Pentagon announcement last month that reporters were no longer permitted to witness the return of soldier's bodies returning from overseas combat. At the time, Pentagon spokesman Captain David Romley explained the ban this way: 'The media can get a better, more complete understanding of the person who has passed by attending and covering funeral services as opposed to coffins arriving aboard an air station.' Last week, Romley confirmed the new policy, but declined to comment on the apparent contradiction between it and his previous explanation. Instead, he directed calls to the ANC press office, which did not return calls seeking comment."

"For a long time, Bush's poor job approval ratings on domestic issues were more than counterbalanced by his strong approval ratings on international issues. But that formula for political success is falling apart," writes Ruy Texeira. The latest polls show that only 48 percent of the public approves of his handling of foreign policy and Iraq. A majority believes the war with Iraq was not worth the cost and that the Bush administration was hiding information or lying about what it knew when it made the case for war. "No wonder the Bush team was so happy to see one quarter of good economic growth," Texeira writes. "Their plan A (invade Iraq in 2003; coast to victory on the national security issue in 2004) is now completely out the window. Wise Democrats won't let the voters forget just how deceitful and costly that plan A has been; even wiser Democrats will have clear ways of explaining to voters how we can get out of the mess that plan A has created. By the evidence of these polls, voters are ready to listen."

With little fanfare and almost no media coverage, Congress recently passed House Resolution 3077, which threatens academic freedom by imposing rules on what professors can and can't teach. HR 3077 focuses in particular on "area studies" (university programs that study international culture and politics in specific regions of the world). Proponents of the bill, warns Benita Singh, portrayed area studies programs as "hotbeds for anti-American sentiment" in order to propose "the creation of an advisory board that has the final word on curricula taught at Title VI institutions, course materials assigned in class, and even the faculty who are hired in institutions that accept Title VI funding. ... According to the language of the bill, professors whose ideological principles may not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any part of a course's curriculum containing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed entirely anti-American can be barred from ever being taught."

President Bush's popularity skyrocketed after 9/11 as the country naturally rallied around its leadership. Bush announced that his war on terror would define his presidency and the 2004 Republican convention will be held in New York city as close as possible to the third anniversary of 9/11. Now, the New York Times reports that the Republican Party is launchiing "its first advertisement of the presidential race, portraying Mr. Bush as fighting terrorism while his potential challengers try to undermine him with their sniping. The new commercial gives the first hint of the themes Mr. Bush's campaign is likely to press in its early days. It shows Mr. Bush, during the last State of the Union address, warning of continued threats to the nation: 'Our war against terror is a contest of will, in which perseverance is power,' he says after the screen flashes the words, 'Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.' "

"A number of explosions tore through the British consulate in Turkey today, killing scores of people. George W. Bush is in England, surrounded on all sides by enraged British citizens whose massive protests have required nearly every police officer in London to be put on the line of defense," writes William Rivers Pitt. "It is 3:16 p.m. on Thursday afternoon as I write this. CNN has been covering, with total exclusivity, a parking lot outside a police station for the last hour. They covered an airplane landing. They covered the same airplane sitting still on the tarmac. They covered the airplane slowly moving into a hangar. All the while, talking head after talking head explored every conceivable facet of the parking lot, the plane, the tarmac, and the hangar, as well as a variety of parallel issues. No stone of data was left unturned. Why? Michael Jackson is about to surrender to police."

A news release from the Environmental Working Group reveals that "the chemical industry plans to conduct a covert campaign attacking the growing movement in California for more chemical safety testing, with tactics including the creation of phony front groups and spying on activists, according to an internal American Chemistry Council (ACC) memo. ... It recommends to ACC members that they pay $120,000 a year to Nichols-Dezenhall, a Washington-based firm that hires former FBI and CIA agents, to conduct 'selective intelligence gathering ... about the plans, motivations and allies of opposition activists... Focus on the PP [Precautionary Principle] movement leadership in the U.S., and in particular, California.' The memo says Nichols-Dezenhall would also 'create an independent PP watchdog group to act as an information clearinghouse and criticize the PP in public and media forums... The group could be structured as a tax-exempt organization.'" The EWG release spawned articles in the San Francisco Chroncile and the Oakland Tribune.

"Freedom of the press is beginning to smell a little rotten in the new Iraq," reports Robert Fisk, listing some of the fatwas that U.S. Proconsul Paul Bremer has issued against Al Jazeera and other Arab media. "Things are no better in the American-run television and radio stations in Baghdad. The 357 journalists working from the Bremer palace grounds have twice gone on strike for more pay and have complained of censorship. According to one of the reporters, they were told by John Sandrock - head of the private American company SAIC, which runs the television station - that 'either you accept what we offer or you resign; there are plenty of candidates for your jobs.'" On the other hand, more than 100 newspapers have sprung up, some of which "have carried blatantly untruthful stories about the occupation army, claiming that U.S. soldiers have been involved in distributing pornographic pictures to schoolgirls or taking Iraqi women to the bedrooms of the Palestine Hotel. One problem is that many journalists for the Iraqi papers are either converts from the old regime or new writers who have no journalistic training in fairness or fact checking."

"James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence -- until now."

Nextel Communications "is becoming a principal sponsor of a monorail system that is scheduled to start serving Las Vegas in January, underwriting the branding of the Convention Center stop as well as one of nine four-car trains with the Nextel name, logo and colors. ... Coca-Cola is also negotiating with the Las Vegas Monorail Company to become a sponsor there, along with companies that include Discovery Communications and General Motors. Bacardi and Motorola have signed letters of intent to become sponsors ... . ... Patrick Pharris, president and chief executive of Promethean Partners in Las Vegas, which is selling the sponsorships for the monorail system [comments] 'the biggest brands in the world are saying, we understand consumers are perhaps numbed to traditional advertising, and we have to engage them in our experience. Then the consumers are more likely to become brand proponents and tell their friends about it. If you can convert transportation to 'transpertainment' it becomes a better experience for the consumer and the advertiser.' "

President Bush is in London where he will face days of public protests by many tens of thousands of Brits outraged over US policies on Iraq. Our book Weapons of Mass Deception spent eight weeks on the New York Times extended best seller list despite little attention in the mainstream US media, but relative to population size its sales have been even stronger in the UK. According to the Times of London it is one of the best selling books on the war. The Stop the War Coalition is featuring it as a resource for peace noting that "Rampton and Stauber reveal in chilling detail how public relations experts in the Bush Administration acted deliberately to distort the news, to suppress the facts and to push an America still shocked by the attacks of 9/11 into war in Iraq. They build a damning case against the mainstream media, and its failure to challenge the White House over its most blatant lies and evasions."

Tucker Eskew, director of the White House Office of Global Communications, is leaving his job to set up a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. Eskew was a key player in the Bush administration's campaign to sell the Iraq invasion. O'Dwyer's writes, "He told USA Today in December 2001 that his job was to 'stop big lies and to promote great truths.'" According to the Associated Press, Eskew plans to advise and serve as foreign policy surrogate for Bush's reelection campaign. Before leading the OGC, Eskew served as director of the White House Office of Media Affairs in 2000 and was a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

A Buzzflash editorial rips and deconstructs the latest propaganda effort to link Saddam to 9/11, noting: "the charge that Saddam Hussein was connected to Osama bin Laden, which was recently denied by Bush himself, was resurrected last week in the Weekly Standard. The Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is the 'intellectual' Neo-con bed of radical ideas, subversive to American Democracy. It is kind of like a Pravda for Neo-cons with advanced degrees. FOX News, also owned by Murdoch, of course, received this baton of mistruth and prevarication about the Saddam/Al-Qaeda/9-11 connection (because that is the goal of this lie) and aired it across the nation and world. Meanwhile right wing NewsMax also picked it up. You can rest assured that other Bush Cartel media outlets provided an echo chamber for the lie perpetrated in the Weekly Standard article. Rush Limbaugh was still being 'rehabbed,' otherwise he would have force read it to the Ditto Heads."

"McDonald's chairman and CEO Jim Cantalupo sent an open letter to the press last week complaining about the inclusion of the pseudo-word 'McJobs' in the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary," PR Week writes in its PR Play of the Week feature. "Seems flipping burgers for Ronald has become a synonym for 'a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.' Cantalupo defended McD's workers by declaring that the definition 'is not only an inaccurate description of restaurant employment, it's also a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women who work hard every day in America's 900,000 restaurants.' Since McDonald's has so few chances to tout the wondrous career options available in our fast-food nation, we applaud it for cleverly maximizing even the slimmest opportunity. But those stubborn Merriam-Webster folks, always happy for a little press themselves, weren't buying it. They issued a statement of their own, declaring, '[F]or more than 17 years, 'McJob' has been used as we are defining it in a broad range of publications.'"

"The Senate confirmed longtime Republican spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs," PR Week reports. Tutwiler steps in to fill an eight-month vacancy left when ad queen Charlotte Beers resigned the post for health reasons. Tutwiler reportedly left her post as ambassador to Morocco only after "much cajoling by the Bush administration." During her confirmation hearing she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that America needs to do a better job of listening to foreign audiences. "She declined to comment on any specific methods she may favor for achieving her goal of improving America's image, but State Department officials have privately indicated that the $15 million ad campaign launched by Beers, known as 'Shared Values,' will not be continued," PR Week reports. Tutwiler served as State Department spokeswoman during George H.W. Bush's presidency.

The British government has refused a diplomatic request from the United States for "shoot-to-kill" immunity for armed American special agents and snipers who will be travelling to Britain as part of President Bush's entourage this week, which means that if they accidentally kill a protester, they'll have to stand trial for it. The Brits are also balking at the Bush team's demand that they shut down parts of London's Tube (subway) system and that they create a "sterile zone" around the President to keep the public at bay. The U.S. has also been denied permission to use its "mini-gun," a piece of military hardware that is fired from a tank and can kill dozens of people. (We're not making this up, honest!)

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "has transformed himself from corporate henchman to a crusty old guy who can say anything any time with few repercussions," writes James Ridgeway. "Last year he wanted to set up a special propaganda bureau called the Office of Strategic Influence, but he had to close it down amid reports it was putting out false information in an effort to sway public opinion. In late October he told The Washington Times he wants a '21st-century information agency in the government' to help fight a 'war of ideas.'"

The New York Times has profiled Russ Kick's "memory hole" web site, which saves official documents from oblivion and posts them online. "I'm certainly not a journalist in the normal sense of the word," Kick says. "I'm more of an information archaeologist. I'm trying to get the stuff that's either been purposely buried or just covered over by time."

Georgia Military College officials sent out a news release earlier this week inviting reporters to hear a speech by a helicopter pilot involved in Jessica Lynch's rescue. When they came, however, the college informed them that the pilot, Marine Maj. Craig Kopel, didn't want the news media around. When reporters stayed, hoping to interview and photograph Kopel, the college said they were trespassing and called the police on them.

"With casualties mounting in Iraq, jumpy U.S. soldiers are becoming more aggressive in their treatment of journalists covering the conflict," reports Slobodan Lekic. "Media people have been detained, news equipment has been confiscated, and some journalists have suffered verbal and physical abuse while trying to report on events. Although the number of incidents involving soldiers and journalists is difficult to gauge, anecdotal evidence suggests it has risen sharply the past two months. ... A number of journalists, particularly Iraqis and other Arabs working for foreign media organizations, say they are now routinely threatened at gunpoint if they try to film the aftermath of guerrilla attacks."

Now that Private Jessica Lynch has told the truth about the conditions of her capture and rescue in Iraq, right-wing telebabbler Joe Scarborough is complaining that she "started whining about the Pentagon PR machine and the fact that they told parts of the stories that may have made her more of a hero than she considered herself to be. ... Well, Jessica, I've got bad news to break to you. It was because of the Pentagon PR machine that turned you into an American hero - that got book publishers interested in paying you $1 million to tell your story. It was the Pentagon PR machine that told America how you were a hero that got NBC interested in doing a movie about your story. It was the Pentagon PR machine that's turned you into a millionaire."

Mexican restaurant chain Chi-Chi's has brought in CCG Strategic Communications to deal with PR crisis due to an outbreak of Hepatitis A linked to the restaurant, which has sickened 500 people and killed three in Pennsylvania.

When George W. Bush visits London next week, U.S. officials want to keep protesters out of sight, demanding a rolling "exclusion zone" around the President. "The Stop The War Coalition said yesterday that it had been told by the police that it would not be allowed to demonstrate in Parliament Square and Whitehall next Thursday - a ban it said it was determined to resist," the Independent reports. "The coalition says that it has also been told by British officials that American officials want a distance kept between Mr Bush and protesters, for security reasons and to prevent their appearance in the same television shots. ... The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said yesterday that Mr Bush should not be shielded from public anger about the Iraq war, and Londoners should not have to pick up the

The U.S. sponsored Iraqi Media Network -- planned to include a 24-hour satellite channel, two land-based TV channels, two radio channels, a national newspaper and studios in every major Iraqi region -- promises Iraqis "comprehensive, accurate, fair, and balanced news." The Village Voice's Cynthia Cotts reports, however, that IMN already faces credibility issues. Budgeted at $100 million (part of the $87.5 billion approved for Iraq), the project's money will flow through the Defense Department's Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict division, which also handles military psy-ops. "Critics say the network's mission is weakened by its contradictory goals. So far IMN is touted as both the voice of an occupying military force and an inspiration for Iraqis to produce fair and balanced news coverage. But many Iraqis have already dubbed the network a propaganda organ. (As if to underscore that impression, IMN recently ran a speech by CPA administrator Paul Bremer in which he spoke repeatedly of Hussein as 'the evil one.') A recent poll found that 35 percent of Iraqis now have satellite receivers, and of those, 67 percent prefer to get TV news from the satellite channels Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, rather than from IMN," Cotts writes.

The New York Times reports that former general and corporate lobbyist, now presidential candidate Wesley Clark supports "a proposed constitutional amendment that would make it illegal to desecrate the American flag by burning or other means, a position that puts him at odds with many constituencies in the Democratic Party and several other candidates for the Democratic nomination for president." Changing the U.S. Constitution to ban flag desecration has been criticized for years as a dangerous attack on free speech and dissent. Clark announced his positiion before the American Legion, a well-funded group long behind the amendment through the Citizens Flag Alliance. The CFA has been represented by PR and lobby heavyweights including Burson-Marsteller and Belanger Consulting.

Please help to support our work here at the Center for Media & Democracy with a donation of $35, $100, $1,000 or more. You can securely donate online with a credit card. Donors will receive our award-winning publication, PR Watch, for one year. To ensure independence we refuse to accept corporate or government grants or advertising, and depend on concerned individuals like you. Consider contributing $100 or more to receive a complimentary signed copy of our bestselling book, Weapons of Mass Deception. CMD remains the only public interest organization in the world dedicated to exposing and countering special interest propaganda, and we need your help now more than ever. Thank you!

The second quarter 2003 issue of PR Watch is now available online, featuring stories about the anti-environmental Wise Use movement's propaganda campaign against fish in Oregon's Klamath Basin and an excerpt from our latest book, Weapons of Mass Deception.

In a follow-up to events that we mentioned in May and discussed on the PR Watch Forum, former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite has filed a lawsuit against WJMK, a Florida producer of video news releases, seeking $25 million in damages and saying the company misled him and tarnished his reputation when it persuaded him to appear in videos that promoted prescription drugs and other products. The company previously filed suit against Cronkite in September after he tried to end a contract he had signed to appear as the host of a series of videos, including some called American Medical Review.

Faced with the nation's growing waistline and flat sales in recent years, fast-food restaurants are relying on new products and PR to help improve their image and their profit. "Mike Donahue, VP, US communications and customer satisfaction for McDonald's, notes that PR pioneered McDonald's integrated marketing push on its salads," PR Week writes. "The company aligned its salads with Paul Newman's Newman's Own brand of salad dressings, offering those dressings for its new product. Newman's Own is highly regarded in the world of natural and organic foods. The company donates its profits to charitable and educational causes, giving more than $150 million since 1982. 'We felt the social responsibility connection would be impactful,' says Donahue. McDonald's launched its salads in March with a New York press event featuring Newman. PR from that sent salad sales up 15% even before advertising started, Donahue says. 'There was real credibility with Newman,' he recalls."

Miami police will be "embedding" reporters with police squads during next week's protests against trade negotiations.The Associated Press reports, Police Chief John Timoney said his embedding plan would place journalists on the front lines during the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks taking place in Miami. Police expect tens of thousands of demonstrators. "The news organizations invited to participate in the embedding include The Associated Press, NBC, Reuters, The Miami Herald, CNN, Fox and several TV stations. The police are still drawing up the rules reporters must follow, so individual organizations have not officially agreed yet to participate," AP writes. "The journalists will be responsible for their own safety and will be required to have a riot helmet and gas mask. Journalists are also required to sign a release form as well as agree not to report on such things as the number of officers in a unit or how many units are participating in an event."

Buzzflash editorializes, "So this, in summary, is what happened: The Bush Cartel Ministry of Truth heard that a young blonde female soldier was severely injured and they made up a heroic story about her, as part of their ongoing Iraq-war attempt to manipulate American public opinion. And what does Jessica Lynch do? She has the nerve to toss out the script the propagandists wrote for her. She has the audacity to speak for herself. She has the American heartland respect for the truth. She became a hero, in an entirely different role than the Bush Cartel wrote for her. Jessica Lynch, the young woman who joined the army after she was turned down for a position at Wal-Mart has something no one else in the Bush Cartel has -- or anyone in the fawning corporate media -- or anyone of the braying 'amen choir' of millionaire GOP television and radio pundits: Jessica Lynch has integrity."

Frank Rich writes, "Ah, the dazzling pyrotechnics of 'shock and awe.' The finality of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue. The thrill of that re-enactment of 'Top Gun.' The sense of closure provided by the banner reading 'Mission Accomplished.' Like all wars of the TV age, the war in Iraq is not just a clash of armies, but a succession of iconic images. Those who control the images, and the narratives they encapsulate, control history. At least until a new reality crashes in. ... The Bush administration tries to shut down pictures as effectively as it has stonewalled Congressional committees and the bipartisan commissions looking into intelligence failures surrounding 9/11."

"Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place. ... 'It's wrong,' she said." Lynch's book written by Rick Bragg claims she was raped, although she has no memory of being raped and her Iraqi doctors who saved her life are saying they saw no evidence of sexual assault and they are wondering why such sensational claims are being made. Documentary filmmaker Stephen Ives says the Jessica Lynch saga gave the media "a chance to avoid some of the independent reporting that they could have been doing. What's significant about Jessica Lynch in terms of the future, is that the Army took their own cameras along on the rescue mission. It's not too big a stretch, I believe, to imagination an ever increasingly sophisticated Pentagon shooting more and more of their own 'news.' If that happens, it will challenge the media to avoid becoming a mouthpiece for propaganda."

"Shirley and Banister Public Affairs has been selected to promote Harper Collins' Because Each Life is Precious, the account by Iraqi lawyer Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief of Pfc. Jessica Lynch's capture and rescue during the Iraq invasion," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. Craig Shirley, president and CEO of Shirley & Banister is a long-time Republican PR man. PR Week writes, "As a communications consultant for the Republican National Committee in 1980, Shirley was sent around the country to media-train press secretaries in House and Senate races. Two of his trainees were now-departed Bush spokespeople Torie Clarke and Ari Fleischer." In PR Watch 2nd Quarter 2001, we reported on Shirley's front group Disabled Americans for Death Tax Repeal, which ran full-page advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times, urging Congress to abolish the federal estate tax. According to their website, Shirley & Banister's clients include the Heritage Foundation, McDonnell Douglas, the Manhattan Institute, National Rifle Association, the National Taxpayers Union, Nuclear Energy Institute, Washington Times Foundation among others.

Addressing the National Endowment for Democracy, George W. Bush said that "the United States must commit itself to a decades-long transformation of the Middle East and termed the U.S. occupation of Iraq a turning point in the future of worldwide democracy," the Washington Post reports. "Bush's speech was the latest effort by the administration to stop the slipping support for the U.S. occupation of Iraq at home and abroad. Though he had previously mentioned the spread of Mideast democracy as a justification for the invasion of Iraq, Bush elevated that rationale to primacy yesterday, making no mention of weapons of mass destruction and only passing reference to national security and terrorism." But Washington has a "long-standing credibility problem" in the Middle East. "In the past, every time a U.S. official has talked about democracy and responsible government, people in the region have looked at them and said, 'You're running against a 50-year legacy of doing the opposite.' We grew up understanding that the United States would not tolerate real democracy as we'd end up with governments or leaders or ideologies that were not compatible with the West," Hisham Melhem, an Arab journalist and commentator, told the Post.

In her first significant public interview, Private Jessica Lynch has debunked many of the official stories told by the U.S. military about her personal heroics, abuse at the hands of Iraqis, and rescue. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," Lynch said, adding that it bothered her that "they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong." Meanwhile, an NBC docudrama about Lynch's rescue is taking as many liberties with the truth as the Pentagon. Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi who led the Americans to Lynch, is the focus of the NBC documentary and was reportedly an advisor to NBC on the film that lionizes his heroism. After the rescue he was granted asylum in the US and given a job at the powerful DC lobby shop run by Republican Bob Livingston and Democrat Toby Moffet. Livingston has personally lobbied in the past for GE, the parent company of NBC. The movie is likely to spur sales of Mohammed's book which is being promoted by his lobbyist co-worker Lauri Fitz-Pegado. She was, in 1990, the account supervisor for the Hill & Knowlton PR firm's lucrative work with the front group "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" which featured the phony and now infamous "Nayirah" claims about Iraqi soldiers killing babies in hospitals.

"Nissan Motors is planting actors in movie theaters to perform live commercials before the start of showings of 'The Matrix Revolutions' in an effort to expose jaded, skeptical consumers to advertising by masking it as something else. The brief in-person pitches feature actors scattered among the ticket-buying audience who stand and deliver lines that evoke the words spoken by poets at events known as slams or jams. Their performances are timed to accompany a commercial the audience sees on the movie screen, which begins without identifying the sponsor but concludes with the Nissan Altima logo. The campaign by the Nissan North America division of Nissan Motor, intended to pique the curiosity of younger consumers about the Nissan Altima sedan, began yesterday in theaters operated by the Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation in seven large markets and is scheduled to continue through tomorrow."

Recent news reports have heralded a recent jump in the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as signs that the economy is turning around. The question, however is, "Which economy?" While the GDP grew 7.2% last quarter, 146,000 jobs were lost. That's good news for corporate CEOs, but bad news for most of the rest of us. And economists warn that even the boost to the CEO economy is a temporary "sugar high" that won't last once markets respond to tolerate the fiscal recklessness and heavy debt the White House has embraced. As Jonathan Tahini observes, "GDP was never meant to be such a central factor in describing economic growth" and its current use for that purpose produces a grossly distorted picture.

If corporations can play the talk radio game, so can labor unions. United Auto Workers has put money and resources into developing the i.e. America Radio Network, which syndicates liberal talk radio from coast to coast. "Following on i.e.'s successes, AnShell media, according to industry rumors, is on the verge of achieving funding goals to roll out America's second liberal radio network in January," notes i.e. America talker Thom Hartmann. "Al Gore and Joel Hyatt are talking about a cable TV network to take on Fox News. ... Progressive business people and labor unions are learning from the success of conservative media that with a good business plan and a little patience it's possible to both advance your side's social/political goals and to reach customers and potential members. Working together with progressive talent, liberal activists, and progressive, democracy-oriented companies and unions, America's "new liberal media" just may succeed in the battle to wrest American back from the clutching fingers of the extremist conservatives who've held sway these past two decades."

The New York Times' Nicolas Kristof writes, "Ultimately, Saddam's rule collapsed in part because he couldn't read Iraq and made decisions based on hubris and bad information. These days, President Bush and his aides are having the same problem. Critics complain that they lied to the American public about how difficult the war would be, but I fear the critics are wrong: they didn't just fool us -- they also fooled themselves. Evidence suggests that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have actually believed that our troops would be, as Mr. Cheney predicted, 'greeted as liberators.' The administration chose to rely not on intelligence but on wishful thinking, and it became intoxicated by the siren calls of Ahmad Chalabi, a silver-tongued charlatan." Ever optimistic, Cheney cited a Zogby International poll to back his claim that there is "very positive news" in Iraq. But Kristof writes that pollster John Zogby told him, "I was floored to see the spin that was put on it; some of the numbers were not my numbers at all." Zogby points his finger at the American Enterprise Institute, who commissioned the poll, as the source of the spin. AEI's interpretation of Zogby's poll was used by Cheney in an October "Meet the Press" appearance.

TV docu-dramas, such as this Sunday's red, white and blue Iraq war mythology Saving Private Lynch, always play fast and loose with the facts, twisting reality into fiction for entertainment's sake. But a much hyped CBS miniseries on Ronald Reagan drew the wrath of the Right, and CBS has dumped the show. The New York Times reports that "CBS executives ... denied they were capitulating to pressure from Republicans and conservative groups in moving the 'The Reagans' to the pay cable channel Showtime, a sister network at Viacom. The decision, they argued, was instead 'a moral call,' reached after concluding that the four-hour television movie carried a liberal political agenda and treated the Reagans unfairly. ... On Oct. 28, the Media Research Center ... wrote a letter to a list of 100 top television sponsors urging them to 'refuse to associate your products with this movie.' At around the same time Michael Paranzino, a former Republican Congressional staff member from Betheseda Md., decided to start a Web site called BoycottCBS.com. ... Last Friday, the Republican National Committee entered the fray."

Some 1,500 journalists, political reformers and citizens at large are convening in our home town of Madison, Wisconsin, November 7th - 9th for the National Conference on Media Reform. The conference begins Friday with a 2pm panel on 'Media and Propaganda During Wartime' featuring professor Nancy Snow, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and our own John Stauber, co-author of Weapons of Mass Deception. The dozens of speakers and performing artists include Bill Moyers, Al Franken, members of the US House and Senate, FCC Commissioners, John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, Ralph Nader, Janine Jackson of FAIR, Billy Bragg and many more.

As the US slips in international opinion polls, some private sector imagemakers think its time to bolster Washington's public diplomacy efforts, PR Week's Douglas Quenqua reports. "Keith Reinhard, chairman of Omnicom ad firm DDB Worldwide, announced the formation of the Task Force to Mobilize American Business for Public Diplomacy, a collection of marketing and PR experts who've come together to help American corporations improve America's image in foreign lands." Reinhard's initial research showed that "the world overwhelmingly shares the same four negative perceptions about US companies: they exploit workers; they're a corrupting influence, promoting values that are in conflict with local customs; they're grossly insensitive and arrogant; and the practice hyper-consumerism, increasing profits it the only priority." "I looked at the data and I said, 'They're talking about companies and brands that mean business to me. ... All these big multinational companies, these are our clients,'" Reinhard told PR Week. "Our own company gets 61% of our revenue from outside the US. So I thought we could organize and address some of these perceptions."

"Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company's internal communications about its electronic voting machines," reports John Schwartz. The company's attorneys have sent letters threatening legal action against the students, who are circulating "thousands of e-mail messages and memorandums dating to March 2003 from January 1999 that include discussions of bugs in Diebold's software and warnings that its computer network are poorly protected against hackers." Questions are also being raised about whether Diebold's voting machines can be trusted to deliver an honest result. "Diebold has become a favorite target of advocates who accuse it of partisanship," Schwartz states. "Company executives have made large contributions to the Republican Party and the chief executive, Walden W. O'Dell, said in an invitation to a fund-raiser that he was 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.'"

A group calling itself Partnership for the West (PFTW) was formally unveiled in late October and aims to influence environmental legislation in Washington. "The group plans to work on 'restoring a common sense balance to economic growth and conservation in the West,'" notes Bill Berkowitz, adding that this "sounds nice, until you see who's behind it. Claiming to be a grassroots lobby group, PFTW actually represents a kinder, gentler and more politically savvy brand of anti-environmentalism. ... The group's members number over a hundred, and include large interests in fossil fuel, logging and mining industries. ... Partnership for the West grew out of summit in Denver, Colorado, attended by elected officials, corporate representatives and long-standing anti-environmental organizations like the American Land Rights Association, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, and People for the USA. Its president, Jim Sims, is the former communications director for the National Energy Policy Task Force - also known as Cheney's secret panel - and helped craft the administration's energy policy." According to Scott Silver, who heads a real environmental group called Wild Wilderness, "These people are paid lobbyists and public relations consultants serving the needs of every imaginable sort of polluter, developer, resource extractor or despoiler of the environment."

As part of its PR strategy to 'by-pass the media filter' that it claims is distorting public perception of the Iraq war with too much negative reporting, the Bush administration has been granting interviews to smaller, more friendly media. A 'media by-pass' tactic of a different sort is being used by critics of the war who, as we've documented in our book Weapons of Mass Deception, have been locked out of mainstream media coverage. Alternet has announced that "A provocative new DVD that documents how the Bush Administration exaggerated the threat of Iraq, debuts today. Produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald, "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About The Iraq War" takes you behind the scenes, as CIA, Pentagon and foreign service experts speak out and reveal the lies, misstatements and exaggerations that the Bush administration used to deceive the public." Word of the DVD is "going to millions of MoveOn members, Nation subscribers, Working Assets customers, and others as part of an unprecedented, simultaneous effort to bypass the film and media gatekeepers and take the information directly to the people."

Local public affairs shows account for less than one half of one percent of all programming on local television stations, according to a study released by the Alliance for Better Campaigns. "Broadcasters have relegated local public-affairs programming to the very bottom of the heap - behind cartoons, kitchenware specials, reruns, courtroom dramas, dating shows and late-night talk shows," reports Jennifer Harper. "The analysis found, for example, that there were three times as many 'Seinfeld' reruns as local public-affairs shows on TV stations nationwide. There were four times as many cartoon shows, seven times as many pro football games, nine times as many dating shows, 19 times as many late-night talk shows, 20 times as many courtroom dramas and 23 times as many soap operas."

"North American marketers are finding their closest service partners halfway around the world," writes Betsy Spethmann. Known as "business process outsourcing," the trend began in the 1990s, when U.S. software developers began hiring Indian programmers during the dot-com boom. Now the trend is affecting technical support and marketing, as companies realize that they get those jobs done cheaper by setting up call centers in places like India. "They're staffed by 20-something college grads who learn American accents and get daily briefings on U.S. news to make small talk with customers," Spethmann reports. "Briefings get pretty precise: In the days after the August East Coast blackout, Indian kids knew what happened in specific Manhattan neighborhoods. They can chat about the weather, the local baseball team, or an upcoming movie." PR industry blogger Greg Brooks worries that public relations could be the next industry to get outsourced.