"Several decades into the era of consumer capitalism, the whiz kids on Madison Avenue have learned fairly well how to attach psychic puppet strings to our minds, but they have never really known why (or often whether) their tricks worked," writes Matthew Blakeslee. "Enter the age of neuroscience. As investigators plumb ever deeper into the strange dynamics of the brain, they are shedding new light on many domains of human behavior, including mental illness, violence, cooperation, addiction, eating and even aesthetics. ... The lines between manipulation, free choice and manufactured vs. true desire could turn out to lie quite differently from how they feel."

"Pick up The Wall Street Journal today, and the business pages are full of stories about the men and women who built the stock market bubble," writes business journalist Philip Longman. "But there's another sector of the economy, deeply implicated in the collapse, whose conflicts of interest, ethical lapses and naive enthusiasms have so far received little press attention: business journalism itself." Longman examines the conflicts of interest and delusions that led journalists to hype the stock market bubble. "Just as Americans put far too much faith in the integrity and intellectual prowess of stock analysts and other supposedly disinterested financial watchdogs during the boom," he writes, "they also put far too much stock in business journalism, and have a right to be disappointed and angry."

New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's new book "High and Mighty -- SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way" hit bookstores September 17. Yet before its release, reporters began receiving a 15-page memo titled "SUV Allegations and Facts." According to the Corporate Crime Reporter the memo "seeks to mislead reporters with quotes taken out of context." The source of the attack memo is Washington DC-based PR firm Strat@comm, which counts as clients DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, and a number of auto industry trade groups. Strat@comm says it got involved because Bradsher's book mentioned two of the company's principles: Diane Steed and Jason Vines. "We take the book personally," Strat@comm told the Corporate Crime Reporter. Steed started "the industry's main fake grassroots group" Coalition for Vehicle Choice to "defeat fuel economy standards." Vines is a former Ford communications head. According to PR Week, the Detroit Free Press reported that Strat@comm was working for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers to rebut Bradsher's book. "We've been monitoring this situation for some time," Strat@comm's Vines told PR Week, "and merely provided a report to the Alliance detailing the facts about SUVs." He said that Strat@comm was not contacting auto writers -- only providing information when asked.

"One of the things medical people really know about is clever advertising and one of the really clever tricks of the industry is duping the media into running advertising campaigns absolutely free of charge," writes Media Watch of Australia as it deconstructs the "Healthy Weight Task Force," a front group set up by the Burson-Marsteller PR firm in Australia to promote sales of Xenical diet pills.

With war against Iraq on everybody's mind, you might not even know about the protests in Washington at last weekend's annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. "Police outnumbered activists, who said U.S. security concerns after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- and low official tolerance for risky tactics -- had forced antiglobalization onto a new, more mainstream tack," reports Laura MacInnis. Lately the most dramatic protests against the World Bank and IMF are not on the streets, but in academia, where Atiya Hussain notes that leading economists are challenging "the very bedrock of these institutions -- that globalization and free trade are a sure-fire path to prosperity."

Marjorie Kelly, editor of Business Ethics magazine, reflects on the "perfect storm in ethics" that has unfolded despite a burgeoning corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement. CSR has failed, she says, because "fluff is not enough." It's time, Kelly says, to begin "talking about system design, understanding why corporations behave so single-mindedly. And that means focusing on power. Because power is what it's all about, not good intentions or voluntary initiatives or toothless codes of conduct. Power."

"Conkling Fiskum & McCormick is counseling a coalition of heavyweight food biotechnology companies in a push to defeat a November ballot initiative in Oregon requiring labels for genetically-modified foods in that state," reports O'Dwyer's PR Daily. The Coalition Against the Costly Labeling Law plans to spend $6 million and has already raised $4.6 million from companies including CropLife International, PepsiCo, General Mills and ConAgra Foods. The citizens movement pushing for labeling of genetically engineered food expects to be massively outspent by corporate dollars flowing into Oregon from food and biotech companies.

"The world's biggest oil bonanza in recent memory may be just around the corner, giving U.S. oil companies huge profits and American consumers cheap gasoline for decades to come. And it all may come courtesy of a war with Iraq," writes Robert Collier. But the Bush administration and U.S. oil firms have stayed quiet on the subject of Iraqi oil. "The administration doesn't want oil to be part of the war discussion because it undercuts the reasoning that the rush to war is because of an imminent (Iraqi) military threat," says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. "If the real motives were made clear -- that this is a grab for oil and an attempt to break the back of OPEC -- it would make our motives look more predatory than exemplary."

In Afghanistan, BBC correspondent got a revealing look at US military propaganda, when two soldiers showed him the laminated cards they had been given with scripted instructions on how to deal with journalists. The card listed suggested answers to questions like: "How do you feel about what you're doing in Afghanistan"? Answer: "We're united in our purpose and committed to achieving our goals." "How long do you think that will take?" Answer: "We will stay here as long as it takes to get the job done - sir!"

Wisconsin has a "deer management" problem. Chronic wasting disease, called CWD but dubbed mad deer disease, has been found in its wild herd of 1.6 million deer. Sales of hunting licenses, and thus state revenue from sales, are down 22% as the big fall hunt approaches. The state's hunting industry is suffering financially and running radio ads and posting billboards that ridicule hunter health concerns as "media hysteria." However, the World Health Organization says that no part of an infected deer should be eaten. A healthy-appearing deer can be infected and no reliable test is available, so what's a hunter to do? To get hunters buying licenses and killing deer, the state is arranging for hunters to donate deer to feed the state's poor and hungry. The state is also stepping up a PR plan that includes public meetings to reassure hunters. To follow the now daily developments visit MadDeer.Org, a website begun by a disgruntled Wisconsin hunter.

"The Lebanese government is prosecuting the news director of a major television station," reports MSNBC, "setting the stage for a broader crackdown on press freedoms in a country once admired as the only bastion of free press remaining in the Arab world. ... Rumors are the true currency of political discussion on the streets and in the cafes of the Arab world, where media outlets are either owned by the government or privately owned by political leaders and under the constant threat of sanction and closure."

"A federal 'No Fly' list, intended to keep terrorists from boarding planes, is snaring peace activists at San Francisco International and other U. S. airports, triggering complaints that civil liberties are being trampled," reports Alan Gathright. Activists who have been stopped and searched at airports worry that the FBI may be reactivating its old anti-war activists file.

In England, businesses are worried that increasing demands for corporate social responsibility could become "compulsory, as in France. From 2003, French companies will have to demonstrate their commitment to CSR by giving detailed accounts of their social and environmental reporting."

"The Bush administration campaign for war against Iraq has been an extravaganza of disingenuousness," writes Michael Kinsley. "The arguments come and go. Allegations are taken up, held until discredited, and then replaced. ... Two overarching concepts -- 'terrorism' and 'weapons of mass destruction' -- are drained of whatever intellectual validity they may have had and put to work bridging huge gaps in evidence and logic."

KCSA PR Worldwide, whose clients include the Zionist Organization of America, is doing PR for the Christian Coalition to support the war in Iraq. The Christian Coalition is organizing a "Christian Solidarity for Israel Rally" and is urging its members to pray for the Iraqi people while we bomb them. Some PR counselors see a conflict of interest and problems down the road when Jewish and fundamentalist Christian agendas collide. "Those, such as Pat Robertson, who see nuclear war in the Mideast as a necessary precursor to the Second Coming bring little to the search for a genuine Mideast Peace, for safe homelands for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples," says Dave Rosensein. "Since KCSA sees no overriding conflict, perhaps KCSA's other client, the Zionist Organization of America, should ask itself whether it needs allies who support Israel, not as a homeland for the Jewish people, as the 1947-48 Partition plans intended, but as the flash point of the Apocalypse predicted in the Revelations of St. John the Divine."

"National PR is organizing the debut tomorrow of the Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions, a group composed of Canada's trade associations largely opposed to the country's plan to adopt the Kyoto global warming treaty. ... [R]epresentatives from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives will outline the Coalition's goals during a press conference tomorrow in Ottawa. ... National is partly owned by Burson-Marsteller," which has a long history of undermining efforts to address global climate pollution.

In case you've missed the hilarious footage of W struggling to say "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me," it's available online in a variety of video formats.

Thanks to the internet archives, we can see what the Cato Institute's "Project on Social Security Privatization" looked like last year and compare that with its new look, now that the stock market crash has reminded the public about the reality of privatization. In the Orwellian new version, all references to "privatization" have been airbrushed out of history and replaced with the word "choice."

For an interesting example of propaganda during wartime, check out "A Challenge to Democracy," a 1944 documentary produced by the U.S. government about the massive internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. "This weird film -- the U.S. government's view of life inside its World War II Japanese-American internment camps -- is an early exercise in political damage control," writes reviewer Ken Smith. "One of its more enjoyable aspects is its baldfaced use of pleasant-sounding euphemisms to recast the nasty things it shows us. ... 'The people are not under suspicion,' the narrator informs us, as we see Japanese-Americans being herded onto trains. ... As the camera pans past armed guards in watchtowers and chain-link fences topped with barbed wire, we are told that these are simply 'symbols of the military nature of the evacuation.' "

"Nothing makes a newspaper prouder than a juicy foreign-policy scoop. Except, it seems, when the scoop ends up raising awkward questions about a U.S. administration's drive for war," writes Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "Back in 1999, major papers ran front-page investigative stories revealing that the CIA had covertly used U.N. weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq for the U.S.'s own intelligence purposes. ... But now that the Bush administration has placed the inspectors at the center of its rationale for going to war, these same papers have become noticeably queasy about recalling UNSCOM's past spying. ... Suddenly, facts that their own correspondents confirmed three years ago in interviews with top U.S. officials are being recycled as mere allegations coming from Saddam Hussein's regime."

"I would say that the greatest threat to democracy right now in the United State is George Bush's casual use of propaganda, and sometimes lies, to advance his case against Iraq," Harper's publisher Rick MacArthur told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. MacArthur is also author of "The Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War." Goodman asked MacArthur to revisit the elder Bush White House's control of the press corps during that administration's Persian Gulf War. Journalists then faced strict Pentagon control, including no freedom of movement and PR escorts at all times. According to MacArthur, major media did not protest the restrictions and many of the players from twelve years ago are still in the picture, including Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. Major media also failed to challenge a Hill & Knowlton run PR campaign for the astroturf organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The campaign is most remembered for promoting the fake story about Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators.

Angola's national oil company has hired the Washington D.C. lobby firm Patton Boggs to improve ties with the U.S. government. "Corruption within Angola's $6 billion energy sector is a key irritant between the two countries," O'Dwyer's PR reports. "The U.S. estimates government officials and their cronies skim about $1 billion from Angola's yearly energy revenues." The one-year contract is worth $2.2 millon and will be led by the well connected Tommy Boggs. Last spring, a cease-fire ended the country's 27-year civil war. "The Government, however, recently sent troops to counter a separatist movement that has arisen in Angola's Cabinda province, which accounts for 60 percent of the country's oil wealth. Angola energy exports to the U.S. equal that of Kuwait," O'Dwyer's writes.

"As veteran ad executive Charlotte Beers finishes her first year as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs there are mixed reviews over whether she has accomplished her goal of improving the nation's image beyond its borders," writes Advertising Age. "Even supporters [of Beers] agree that the nation's image has suffered, but they suggest it is unfair to blame Ms. Beers, placing the blame instead on Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq. Ms. Beers' success, they say, should ultimately be judged not on whether she can get people in other countries to embrace U.S. policies, but whether she can employ the right mix of tools to at least more clearly communicate the nation's view to the rest of the world."

"Senior Republican Party officials say the prospect of at least two more weeks of Congressional debate on Iraq is allowing their party to run out the clock on the fall election, blocking Democrats as they try to seize on the faltering economy and other domestic concerns as campaign issues. ... The emerging dynamic has produced growing if quiet optimism among Republicans that they will be able to turn back the Democratic drive to take control of the House. ... Scott Reed, a Republican consultant, said: 'The secret to the election now is to beat the clock. Every week, you can hear the ripping noise of another page of the calendar coming off the wall. Another week has gone by. And there's only six more to go.' " The article notes that most Democrats now want to vote for the President's war as quickly as possible. The article does not raise an obvious additional image problem for the Democrats: how will pro-war Democrats distinguish themselves from pro-war Republicans when both parties have made supporting the President's war on Iraq the major issue of the day?

"The reasons for a new attack on Iraq have been presented in a series of press-friendly promotional moments that have been long on promises and short on facts," says Moveon.org. "Timing has been a critical factor -- it is no coincidence, for example, that the climax of the push has come immediately after the anniversary of Sept. 11, despite the fact that there is still no proven link between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of last year." To help counter the Bush administration's planned $200 million PR blitz, Moveon.org has produced a useful bulletin explaining the marketing campaign and offering lessons in PR from previous wars.

Bob Somerby examines recent media furor over three detained Muslim medical students in Florida and shows how "little lies" can be used to make the innocent look guilty of larger things. After the three students were arrested, the media widely broadcast a false claim by police that the students had illegally blown through a toll booth without paying the toll. "Over and over, pundits and reporters repeated the charge that one of the students' two cars blew through the toll," Somerby writes. "The assertion was used to build suspicion that the men were up to no good. ... Where does propaganda come from? Minor but highly accessible charges can poison the waters around a target."

"Last week, one simple health message dominated the US media: radical prostate surgery for prostate cancer saves lives. The media were reporting the results of a Swedish trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine yet the trial showed no such thing," reports Jeanne Lenzer. In reality, observes Dr. Otis Brawley at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, "men who have prostatectomies just exchange one form of death for another within six years." Dr. Ivan Oransky, who teaches medical journalism at New York University, explains the spin in plain terms: "If you read the New York Times headline you would be left with the impression that having a radical prostatectomy would lead to a decreased risk of death, but the study showed no such thing. It reduces your risk of death from prostate cancer but that's not necessarily a positive finding. For example, if I were to say, 'Listen we have a great new procedure for people with inoperable brain cancer -- we're going to cut off every one's head and then I can absolutely guarantee that you won't die of brain cancer,' that wouldn't prove very much, would it?"

Madison Avenue-style advertising aimed at Middle Eastern audiences isn't likely to work for the U.S. government, says Harold C. Pachios, chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. "There's more to America than Calvin Klein jeans--and that's the point," said Harold C. Pachios, chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. "We are thought of as superficial, so we need to avoid anything that smacks of the superficial."

No one really knows what police tipster Eunice Stone heard Ayman Gheith and two other Arab-American medical students saying at a Shoney's restaurant in Georgia. The evidence now suggests that the whole sorry episode was based on a misunderstanding, but that hasn't stopped pundits from simply assuming that the medical students were perpetrating a deliberate hoax. "Almost uniformly, the cable press corps simply assumed that Gheith and his colleagues had behaved inappropriately," writes Bob Somerby. "Had Gheith and his friends staged a 'hoax,' 'prank' or 'joke?' Connie Chung's producers didn't know. Brian Williams didn't know. The heinous Sean Hannity didn't know. John Zarrella didn't know. But all over cable, pundits simply assumed that the students had engaged in some sort of misconduct. And the fact that this story was so plainly racial makes their conduct that much more disgraceful."

"After six years, escalating legal fees and a celebrated trial in the heart of Texas cattle country, a federal judge has dismissed a lingering lawsuit accusing Oprah Winfrey of maligning the beef industry," reports the Associated Press. After Winfrey did a show in April 1996 about mad cow disease, a group of Texas cattlemen sued her and vegetarian activist Howard Lyman under the state's "agricultural product disparagement" law. Winfrey beat the cattlemen in a well-publicized federal trial, only to have a second group of cattlemen launch a second lawsuit in Texas state court, forcing her to spend an additional estimated $1 million in legal fees. Now the charade is finally over, after U.S. District Judge Mary Lou Robinson threw out "all claims and causes of action asserted or that could have been asserted" by Cactus Feeding Club Inc. against Winfrey, her production company and Lyman.

"We're getting the band together," White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told the group on their first conference call last week. "The 'Band' is made up of the people who brought you the war in Afghanistan -- or at least the accompanying public-relations campaign," explains Martha Brant. "Now, they're back for a reunion tour on Iraq." Members include: "Deputy Communications Director Jim Wilkinson, 32, a fast-talking Texan who has become an unlikely but keen student of Islam"; "Tucker Eskew, 41, a savvy South Carolinian, who will soon be named the director of the new Office of Global Communications"; and "British spin master Alastair Campbell."

"Some leading members of the American Academy of Pediatrics are expressing outrage that the group is allowing the maker of Similac infant formula to print its corporate logo on the cover of a special edition of the academy's book on breast-feeding," reports the New York Times. "The academy, whose members include 57,000 pediatricians and other pediatric specialists, has long recommended that most mothers breast-feed because of the myriad benefits over formula." Dr. Lawrence M. Gartner, who chairs the academy's executive committee on breast-feeding, said allowing Similac to pay for placement of its logo on the academy's book is "thievery" that "corrupts efforts to promote breast-feeding."

"The myth that the National Educational Association told teachers not to blame Sept. 11 on al-Qaida continues to unravel," reports Brendan Nyhan. "It's now clear that Washington Times reporter Ellen Sorokin based her original myth-creating article on a preliminary NEA Web site that clearly wasn't complete, misconstruing quotations from a recommended sample essay allegedly written by a professor named Brian Lippincott and attributing them to the NEA. Even worse, the essay in question, published by the National Association of School Psychologists on Sept. 15, 2001, was meant to preach tolerance toward Arab and Muslim Americans -- not al-Qaida. And Lippincott, contrary to what has been widely reported, did not even write it. Yet the myth still continues to spread in Op-Ed columns, on TV and even in a comic strip."

"The Department of Education is in the process of a massive overhaul of its Web site to make it easier to use and to remove outdated data -- and ensure that material on the site meshes with the Bush administration's political philosophy," reports Michelle Davis. "The department will strip its ed.gov site of thousands of files." Everything on the site that was produced before the Bush administration took office will be deleted, "unless it is needed for legal reasons or it supports the 'No Child Left Behind Act' of 2001-- the president's key education measure -- or other administration initiatives."

A PR firm's survey shows that fewer companies are devoting time and resources to corporate social responsibility. Jericho Communications polled 264 CEOs of Fortune 1,000 companies and found that 52 percent of the respondents believe corporations acting responsibly can weaken the influence of terrorist groups, while 36 percent are more conscious of corporate social responsibility since the Sept. 11 attacks. (And according to a new report by the private sector arm of the World Bank, corporate responsibility is even good for profits.) However, only 12 percent of CEOs said they're allocating more resources for it.

"The Bush administration has begun a broad restructuring of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy in areas such as patients' rights and public health, eliminating some committees that were coming to conclusions at odds with the president's views and in other cases replacing members with handpicked choices," reports Rick Weiss. The Department of Health and Human Services has shut down or revamped committees set up to give advice on topics such as biotechnology and the effects of environmental chemicals on human health. The Bush administration's subordination of science to politics angers paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve, who thinks he might be able to walk by now if the Bush administration hadn't hobbled stem cell research. "When I was first injured, I thought hope would be a product of adequate funding, and bringing enough scientific expertise to the problem," Reeve said. "But those are not the problems - the budget of the National Institutes of Health has risen from $12bn when I was injured to over $27bn now. What I did not expect was that hope would be influenced by politics."

"The Bush Administration is to launch a multimillion-dollar PR blitz against Saddam Hussein, using advertising techniques to persuade crucial target groups that the Iraqi leader must be ousted," reports Tim Reid. "The campaign will consist of dossiers of evidence detailing Saddam's breaches of UN resolutions, and will be launched this week at American and foreign audiences, particularly in Arab nations sceptical of US policy in the region. ... The campaign, which will initially receive over $200 million (£130 million), will be overseen by the Office of Global Communications, whose existence will not be formally announced until next month." Details about the massive PR blitz that brought us the first war in the Persian Gulf are available in an online excerpt from our book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You.

"If nothing else, the Bush administration has succeeded in making 'Should we attack Iraq?' the most-considered political question in the US today," observes PR Week. Other questions pushed to the background include "How do we punish corporate criminals?" "How do we balance civil liberties with national security?" "Where is Osama bin Laden?" and "What about the economy?" According to Weber Shandwick Worldwide chairman Jack Leslie, who has served as a PR consultant to the White House since 9/11, the Bush administration deliberately waited until Labor Day (and election season) to get the pro-war PR campaign rolling. "Better this than a lot of domestic issues that could be at the forefront," Leslie said. "Not to suggest that this is all [a diversion], but surely they would rather have a debate around Iraq than other issues." But PR Week notes that "Bush's intended invasion is not being at all well-received in [the Arab] world, or anywhere outside the US for that matter. If anything, it's giving the various strains of anti-American sentiment floating around there a single, substantive issue which they can glom on to. ... So one has to wonder, if this effort is largely about keeping American voters thinking about Saddam instead of Skilling, is it accomplishing its goal at the expense of America's credibility abroad?"

A week after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Director Christie Whitman issued a news release claiming that air pollution caused by the collapse of the World Trade Towers was no big deal. "I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breath and their water is safe to drink," she said. Several leading outlets went along with these assurances, even repeating industry mouthpiece Steven Milloy's absurd claim that more asbestos at the WTC would have saved lives. Now the truth is emerging, etched in the lungs of the rescue workers who dug through the wreckage. "A year after the Sept. 11 attacks, medical studies are showing that hundreds of World Trade Center rescue workers are still struggling with respiratory problems," reports the Washington Post. "For firefighters, one of the better documented groups, illnesses have necessitated lengthy medical leaves. ... About half of the 358 firefighters who developed the 'World Trade Center cough' remain on medical leave or light duty, according to a study of 10,116 firefighters published in the New England Journal of Medicine's Sept. 12 issue. ... [N]early 500 firefighters may have to retire by year's end because of their failing health."

If you're wondering how corporate America was able to bamboozle so many people into throwing their life savings away on worthless investments, part of the answer lies in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA), which was lobbied into law by the National Investor Relations Institute. The PSLRA created a legal "safe harbor" for companies that issue "forward-looking statements" about predicted future earnings, protecting them from litigation even if they made fundamentally unrealistic earnings predictions. Opponents of the legislation called it "a license to lie." Corporations also pulled out the stops to defeat California's Proposition 211, which would have made it easier to sue corporations that issue misleading financial statements. Tina Harris, whose PR firm is appropriately named "Gold Rush Communications," boasts that she "generated hundreds of newspaper articles and radio and television interviews" to defeat Prop 211 on behalf of a now-defunct industry front group called Taxpayers Against Frivolous Lawsuits. Attorney William Lerach, who specializes in suing corporations on behalf of investors, has written a couple of essays explaining how Wall Street, the big accounting firms, and corporate America lobbied Congress to undermine the quality of financial reporting.

"A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001. The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC)." (Note: calling this a "secret" blueprint is a bit of a stretch, since it has been available on the PNAC website for at least the past year.)

American journalists have totally fallen down on the job when it comes to reporting from Baghdad, writes Nina Burleigh, who was one of the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War. That allows the White House to make increasingly hyperbolic -- and false -- claims about the Iraqi threat to America. "This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam," Burleigh writes. In reality, though, "Anyone who spends a little time in Baghdad knows there is one thing the dwindling, beaten-down middle class of that country fears more than the hideous regime of Saddam Hussein: an Islamic uprising. ... As much as they hate their dictator, Iraqis hate the Islamists even more. As a Sunni Muslim, so does Saddam. As in the 1980s, this creepy strongman is standing between Iraqis and the jihad." The Bush administration is so determined to prevent facts like this from getting in its way that its plan to use military force in Iraq "was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision," reports the Washington Post. "An intelligence official says that's because the White House doesn't want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions." And with journalists asleep at the switch, no one else will detail those uncertainties either.

U.S. AID Administrator Andrew Natsios has accused environmentalists "of endangering the lives of millions of famine-threatened Africans by encouraging their governments to reject genetically modified U.S. food aid." Natsios said environmentalists "are using big-time, very well-organized propaganda the likes of which I have never seen before," and called it "revolting and despicable to see them do so when the lives of Africans are at stake." For a more balanced discussion of the issue, the GE Food Alert Campaign Center has posted a CNN interview that featured Natsios alongside representatives of Zambia, the World Bank and Friends of the Earth.

The Republican Party in Kansas City is backpedalling after running an advertisement on black radio stations attacking Social Security as a form of "reverse reparations" to blacks. "You've heard about reparations, you know, where whites compensate blacks for enslaving us," says the ad. "Well guess what we've got now. Reverse reparations ... So the next time some Democrat says he won't touch Social Security, ask why he thinks blacks owe reparations to whites." Joshua Micah Marshall comments, "In cases of low-rent sleaze like these it's hard to know whether to fix on to the dishonesty, the crassness, the ugly caricature of gullible blacks the ad is intended to appeal to, or just the pitiful dorks themselves who hatched the idea."

The Pew Internet Project has published a report examining how September 11 affected public attitudes and use of the Internet. Perhaps the most disturbing change has been that more Americans support greater government secrecy, along with monitoring of people's email and online activities. On the other hand, the terrorist attack has also encouraged the rise of do-it-yourself journalism, as "many non-news sites were turned into conduits for information, commentary, and action related to 9/11 events. ... In the days after the attacks, the Web provided a broad catalog of facts and fancy related to 9/11, ranging from eyewitness accounts from New York, Washington, and across the nation, to government reports, to analysis from experts and amateurs. With the eyes of the world focused on a small number of related events, many stepped into the role of amateur journalist, seeking out sources and sometimes assembling these ideas for others."

The American Journalism Review reports that openness in government is under assault throughout the United States, along with journalistic freedom. "Fear can short-circuit freedom," observes Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Each year his organization conducts an annual survey of Americans' attitudes toward the First Amendment. Thanks to 9/11, the results are disturbing.

• "For the first time in our polling, almost half of those surveyed said they think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees."
• "The least popular First Amendment right is freedom of the press."
• "More than 40 percent of those polled said newspapers should not be allowed to freely criticize the U.S. military's strategy and performance."
• "More than four in 10 said they would limit the academic freedom of professors and bar criticism of government military."

Nancy Snow, author of Propaganda, Inc. and the upcoming Information War: American Propaganda, Opinion Control and Free Speech Since 9/11, gives a broad-ranging interview about how the current U.S. propaganda war is playing out. "Since World War I, advertising has mixed with selling war, foreign aid, and even cultural exchanges. ... This is what the U.S. is to the world—the ultimate salesman," she says. "We appear to the world like the world's Barnum & Bailey, and remember what P.T. Barnum said, 'A sucker is born every minute.' ... The propaganda message is that no really, we're the greatest nation on earth, perhaps in P.T. Barnum's view, the greatest show on earth. I think the world's people and its press are becoming weary of this refrain."

Two advertising executives turned novelists have launched a new company that plans to pay established authors to write specially commissioned fictional books on demand for government departments and businesses seeking to convey "difficult ideas" to the public. "Already there are takers," reports the Independent of England. "The Foreign Policy Centre, an independent think tank whose chief patron is Tony Blair, has spent £15,000 on an online novella called Need to Know about an anti-globalisation campaigner who abandons direct action in favour of protesting via the internet."

The prominent Patton Boggs PR firm is distributing a document on Capitol Hill on behalf of its client, Saudi Arabia. The document portrays the Saudis as partners in the "war on terror" and victims themselves of terrorism. According to O'Dwyer's PR Daily, "The Embassy's 'Background FAQ' deals with 'hot button' issues such as 'Saudi Support for Osama bin Laden,' 'Alleged Saudi Funding for Terrorism,' 'Saudi Freezing of Assets,' 'Saudi Education System and Anti-Americanism,' 'Saudi Arabia and Suicide Bombers,' and 'Stability in Saudi Arabia.'"

During the 1950s and 60s, FBI agents kept a file on Mad Magazine, worrying that its wisecracks about J. Edgar Hoover and spoofs about the John Birch Society and draft dodgers might be communist propaganda. Thanks to the Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts, the FBI-MAD files are now available online, accompanied by an interview with Mad editor Al Feldstein. "All through my years as editor of MAD, I was constantly and continuously surprised and amazed at reader reaction to the satirical, humorous, tongue-in-cheek, absolutely outlandish articles we'd run," Feldstein says. "People with no sense of humor had no business reading it. ... Some readers would take us deadly serious ... and chastise us and berate us for whatever we'd just published. Some readers (not necessarily 'fans') would go even further...and accuse us of being Un-American, etc. ... And some readers, like an FBI Director with real problems about his public image, would send his Agents to attempt to intimidate us."

Halliburton Corp., Vice President Dick Cheney's troubled former company, has hired spin doctor Michael Sitrick, whose firm was most recently hired by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to manage its pedophile-priests scandal. "Halliburton, being sued by shareholders for alleged fraud, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and might face a financial meltdown if it can't negotiate a global settlement over asbestos litigation," notes the Washington Post.

In a new wrinkle on product-placement deals (known in the advertising lingo as "product integration"), the Island Def Jam Music Group is talking with Hewlett-Packard Co. about a deal to write product mentions into hip-hop songs. "If companies are willing to pay a premium to have their brands in movies, why wouldn't they jump at the chance to be in songs?" said a music industry executive.

Life is tough these days for corporate executives, sighs US News & World Report. "After being lionized by investors and the media and showered with money and perks for the past decade, corporate officers and directors are now feeling the heat," writes Matthew Benjamin. "To many executives, the job may not be worth the hassle," and many are worried about the legal liabilities that now come with the job. "Indeed, after terrorists, executives and directors may be the prime targets of federal crimebusters nowadays." Big business is racing to reform itself -- in words, if not in deeds. Citizenship is gaining steam among CEOs, and responsibility is high on the boardroom agenda. The number of companies publishing corporate responsibility reports has risen 35% in the past three years, but business writer Kimberly Weisul notes that "no common standards govern the statistics or assertions in these reports, leading to what some fear is a mishmash of incomplete and possibly misleading information." Even so, a partner at the KPMG accounting firm warns that responsibility reporting may create expectations that companies can't deliver. According to Business Week, "such reports can hold companies accountable, which may be exactly what some are afraid of."

What do George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Britt Hume, Rush Limbaugh, John Ashcroft, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reily and Jerry Falwell all have in common? They're all listed in the "Chickenhawk Database." Compiled by Vietnam veteran and newspaper editor Steve Fowle, the database lists pro-war pundits who "share three qualities: bellicosity (a warlike manner or temperament), public prominence, and a curious lack of wartime service when others their age had no trouble finding the fight." The Washington Post notes that many of "the nation's most persistent voices in support of military attack on Iraq ... are people who never served in Vietnam or saw first hand the carnage that war produces." Conservative Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, agrees: "It is interesting to me that many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war. They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off."

Reporters Without Borders, a group that advocates for greater press freedoms, has issued a report warning that security abuses by the world's governments in the year since September 11 have increasingly put the Internet under the control of government security forces. Many countries have introduced facilities for general retention of data about people's e-mail traffic and Internet activity, turning Internet service providers and telecommunications companies into "a potential arm of the police." The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the G8 nations have all challenged cyber-freedoms. "What would the citizens of Europe and elsewhere do," asked RWB's Robert Menard, "if they were told a law had been passed allowing what they sent through the post to be routinely read by the police at any time

Unfortunately, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2002, are becoming something of a tacky marketing opportunity for various companies. But look at this website pushing what looks like a 9/11 memorial dollar bill with George Bush's face in place of George Washington. Is it for real, or a parody, or what? Phone calls to the number listed (309.210.5149) have reached either a recording or an out-of-order message. The photo of President Bush on the "Bush Memorial Dollar Bill" is less than flattering, and the description of the bill makes it sound less than legal since it so closely mimicks real money. Is it real, or a real parody, or just real bad taste? The world of virtual reality on the web makes it hard to tell so buyer beware!

In 1990, George H. W. Bush built a case for war with Iraq by claiming that 250,000 Iraqi troops were positioned and threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. "It was a pretty serious fib," says journalist Jean Heller, who investigated the administration's claim and found no evidence for it. Now the administration of George the Younger seems to be using very similar disinformation. The Christian Science Monitor notes that the same people who invented disinformation to support the first war with Iraq are now in charge of Dubya's current war drive. "This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq," says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence. "It is one of the reasons it doesn't want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe."

A year has passed since the U.S. launched its war on terrorism. "Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that most of the initial 'war aims' have not been achieved," reports Jane's Intelligence Digest, a leading publisher of military and security analyses. "In fact, in the view of many within the Western intelligence community, Al-Qaeda is probably stronger now than it was before 11 September. The reasons for this are complex, but key factors include the enormous growth in grassroots support for the group throughout much of the Islamic world. ... At a time when Washington is seen as Israel's key ally, it has been very easy for Al-Qaeda to present itself as the Islamic world's means of striking back against unequal forces. The West underestimates the attraction of Al-Qaeda's propaganda message to many Muslims at its peril. Another key political mistake has been to focus on secondary distractions, such as the 'axis of evil', while soft-peddling on the principal sponsors of Al-Qaeda: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The unpalatable truth is that these two 'allies' of the West have played an undeniable role in the growth of Bin Laden's group into an international terrorist network."

"Yes, the secretary of state is a 'moderate' -- compared to the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld," Media Beat columnist Normon Solomon writes. "But that's not saying much. And history tells us, even if the press won't, that Powell does not have a record as a man of conscience. ... Instead of undermining prospects for a military conflagration, Powell's outsized prestige is a very useful asset for the war planners. The retired general 'is seen by many of Washington's friends and allies abroad as essential to the credibility of Bush's foreign policy,' the French news agency AFP noted as September began." Solomon lists a few of Powell's lesser-known career highlights, including his work as President Reagan's national security adviser, where he was "a key operator in U.S. efforts to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua." Powell also was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, during which he emerged as the crucial figure in the decision to invade. "Powell's 'moderate' approach is in sync with the outlook of Fareed Zakaria, former managing editor of the elite periodical Foreign Affairs, who shares Powell's interest in urging the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq -- a good PR step in the quest for a confrontation leading to war," Solomon writes.

Oil company executives meeting at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in South Africa say they "want to put a kinder face on their industry practices. But their critics are skeptical and none is smiling yet," reports Associated Press writer Bill Cormier. According to Greenpeace, the oil industry's real agenda at the summit has been "killing off any agreements on clean energy." Meanwhile, Shell is still avoiding responsibility for its collaboration with Nigeria's brutal dictatorship and South Africa's own former apartheid regime. And BP, the oil company that talks the most about its social responsibility, has been accused by some of its own workers of taking risks with their safety.

There may be hope on the horizon, according to the New York Times, which reports that the "once-overwhelming influence of television advertising on political campaigns is declining," leading politicians "to embrace aggressively old-fashioned campaign tools like telephone calls and door-knocking in this year's Congressional elections." According to Missouri Democrat Richard Gephardt, "The amount of television and the proliferation of television channels is lessening the importance of television advertising over time. And there is the saturation factor: People cycle after cycle see these ads and they are just tuning them out."

"Sustainable Development is dead. Its demise came, ironically, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development," CorpWatch's Kenny Bruno writes in his report from the UN meeting in Johannesburg. "It's not that the phrase wasn't invoked. It was, ad nauseum. But it was hardly discussed. Instead, sustainable development was deemed to be whatever compromise governments happen to reach on trade, subsidies, investment and aid, and whatever projects corporations see fit to finance. 'Sustainable Development' is now officially meaningless."

George Hesselberg, columnist with the Wisconsin State Journal, is fed up with all the government and media hype for war on Iraq. He excoriates the ignorance of US citizens as reflected in recent surveys but asks, "What do you expect in a country where ... the media seem to spend more money printing fast-fading flags and producing flag-waving promotions than on researching and reporting the actual degradation of rights, even the dissolution of rights, among citizens. ... Isn't it odd that government leadership is so rabidly intent on invading Iraq that it appears more attention is being paid to overthrowing a nation's psyche (our own) by zealous public relations than accumulating any solid evidence such an invasion is necessary? ... We wait and wait for someone in charge to ask: Invade Iraq? Are you nuts? We wait and wait for the media to stop showing deference and start showing some defiance. ... Is it a measure of cynicism if we think that this is an attempt to take everyone's attention away from endemic regulator-ignored corporate criminality? Or to keep people from noticing that a human-rights-stomping religious fanatic may be running the Justice Department?"

PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are among the supporters of a new activist coalition that aims to promote critical thinking about today's corporate-dominated mass media and encourage democratic reforms. Registration is still open for a founding summit that will be held from October 18-20, 2002 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, bringing together groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Center for a New American Dream, Commercial Alert, MediaChannel and Project Censored.

The State Department is providing media training to Iraqi dissidents to "help make the Bush administration's argument for the removal of Saddam Hussein," PR week reports. In addition to teaching the 17 Iraqis how to write "effective op-eds and speeches," the State Department is giving direction on "what to speak about in order to convince the public of the need to topple Hussein." PR Week reports a State Department spokeswoman saying, "The message is democracy. The message is open and free elections. The message is what we have in our basic Bill of Rights." WNYC's "On the Media" spoke with Muhanned Eshaiker, who serves on the board of the Iraqi Forum for Democracy and is receiving State Department training. Eshaiker told "On the Media," "I think the Iraqis in exile were not really taking advantage of the media opportunities. ... We probably stumble or wait and say well, I mean what's the use -- everybody knows he's a criminal, so what's the use if we just add another story over or another crime? But everything counts! You know, the -- if we keep hammering on the same nail, the nail is going to find its way through."

"The next time an overly friendly blond sidles up in a crowded bar and asks you to order her a brand-name martini, or a cheery tourist couple wonder whether you can take their picture with their sleek new camera-in-a-cell phone, you might want to think twice," warns Daniel Eisenberg. "There's a decent chance that these strangers are pitchmen in disguise, paid to oh-so-subtly pique your interest in their product." Eisenberg examines the growing use of "stealth marketing" -- covert product placements. No longer content to place their products on TV shows and movies, marketers are planting shills in bars, restaurants and other places, blurring the line between advertising and real life.

Columnist Steve Barnes describes his chat with David Howard, a "very nice young gentleman" who flacks for R.J. Reynolds. The Arkansas state legislature is considering an increase in cigarette excise taxes, and Howard belongs to a "cadre of public relations specialists with the seemingly impossible job of persuading the 75 percent of Arkansans who do not smoke cigarettes that the 25 percent who do should not pay more for their habit."

Did America's largest teachers union construct a subversive web site concerning September 11? This nasty slander against the National Education Association has been spreading across the