"Qorvis Communications is representing Seisint Inc., the Boca Raton-based database company, that is home to the Matrix -- Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange -- which has privacy advocates on edge," O'Dwyer's PR Reports. According to an Associated Press story, the Matrix is similar to Admiral Poindexter's ill-fated Terrorism Information Awareness program. Receiving $12 million in federal funds, the Matrix pools government records from 13 states and cross references them with private data. Matrix boosters say it's a tool for state and local police. AP report, however, that access may be given to the Central Intelligence Agency, violating a 1970s law placed on the agency. "Amber Zentis, of Qorvis, handles the Seisint account. She has more than 25 years of experience in the private and public sectors, and counseled Lockheed Martin on its 'smart card' initiative in southern California," O'Dwyer's reports. Qorvis has received frequent media attention for representing Saudi Arabia.

"Trying to capture the high ground in the nation's ongoing debate over obesity and nutrition, McDonald's has teamed up with Oprah Winfrey's personal trainer to demonstrate its commitment to healthy foods and physical fitness," PR Week reports. McDonald's new "Go Active" meal includes a salad, water or soda, a pedometer and an information booklet by Winfrey's trainer Bob Greene. According to PR Week, the affiliation with Greene and the new meal are part of an "effort to exert leadership in another area of social responsibility. We feel it's our obligation to go out there and help change the discussion," said Mike Donahue, VP, US communications and customer satisfaction at McDonald's. Greene is doing media interviews on behalf of McDonald's and is scheduled to speak to members of the American Dietetic Association. "McDonald's says its new salad line has been a hit with mothers of young children and feels that Greene's association with Oprah should help it continue to be a draw for that group," PR Week reports.

What should President Bush do now that the propaganda that deceived a nation into war is being exposed? G. Clotaire Rapaille, a marketing expert whose work we describe in our book Weapons of Mass Deception, told the New York Times that "The important thing is to tell a story. 'I would have an Iraqi child, and I would make a hero of this child. And then we have him on television telling, `Today I went to school, I talked to my grandmother, and this is what my future is going to be now. I want to study, I want to become an engineer.' Then we can have e-mails sent to this child, we create connections. So that's for one day.' The next day, Mr. Rapaille said, the president's advisers should find a young Iraqi woman who wants to be married and have children, and they should put her on television with the message, 'now there is peace, she can do just that.' The next week, Mr. Rapaille said, 'we have a guy who wants to start a shop to repair cars.' Or as Mr. Rapaille concluded, in the words of a true salesman, 'Right now it's not that the president is not good, it's that the story is bad.' "

Top Bush administration officials have been citing a pair of public opinion polls conducted in Iraq to demonstrate that Iraqis have a positive view of the U.S. occupation, but Walter Pincus points out that the polls actually show Iraqis have a less enthusiastic view than the administration has portrayed. According to one poll, "only 33 percent thought they were better off than they were before the invasion and 47 percent said they were worse off," Pincus writes. "And 94 percent said that Baghdad was a more dangerous place for them to live, a finding the administration officials did not discuss. The poll also found that 29 percent of Baghdad residents had a favorable view of the United States, while 44 percent had a negative view. By comparison, 55 percent had a favorable view of France."

"While officials at Washington D.C.'s National Zoo are trying to keep the public's focus on the positive, behind the scenes they've begun a massive public relations campaign to manage the fallout from the rash of unusual, and unnatural animal deaths," CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson reports. The zoo has hired PR giant Hill & Knowlton to help shape its response to Washington Post stories scrutinizing it. CBS reports, the PR plan sseks to protect zoo director Lucy Spelman and prevent "worst-case scenarios," including more media stories and animal rights groups getting involved. It also suggests recruiting third parties to "independently call the media" and pen letters to the editor. According to an internal memo obtained by CBS News, Spelman instructed employees to gather personal background information on reporters covering the zoo. Hill & Knowlton's bill of $50,000 was paid for by Friends of the National Zoo.

"George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission," David Corn writes in the Nation. "Bush's truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him. Throughout his campaign for the presidency and his years in the White House, Bush has mugged the truth in many other areas to advance his agenda. Lying has been one of the essential tools of his presidency. To call the forty-third President of the United States a prevaricator is not an exercise of opinion, not an inflammatory talk-radio device. Rather, it is backed up by an all-too-extensive record of self-serving falsifications." Corn list of Bush's lies covers tax cuts, the environment and 9/11, but Corn says the list could be much, much longer. "Bush campaigned for the presidency as the fellow who would bring honesty back to the White House. ... Bush's promise was a lie. The future of the United States remains in the hands of a dishonest man," Corn writes.

George W. Bush's White House has been charged repeatedly with using its influence to undermine environmental protection. The Senate confirmation hearing on Bush's nomination of Utah Governor Michael Leavitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency provided another forum for scrutinizing Bush's environmental record, according to the New York Times. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chair James Inhofe (R-OK) firmly denied environmentalists' claims as baseless, at one point saying the concept of global warming "could be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," the Times reports. The same day the Times reported on the disintegration of an ancient Arctic ice shelf. "[Researchers] said it was not yet possible to say whether the melting was related to rising atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases from human activities. But they added that the breakup was just one of many signs of enormous climate shifts in the Arctic that merited careful monitoring," the Times reports.

"Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council today temporarily banned two popular Arab satellite television stations from covering the council's news conferences and entering government ministries because of what it called 'irresponsible activities' that threaten the country's 'democracy and stability' and encourage terrorism," the Washington Post reports. Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya were slapped with a two-week "penalty" for allegedly violating "media-conduct rules," which were outlined for the first time in today's edict. "Those rules include a ban on statements promoting the return of the Baath Party or provoking sectarian strife," the Post writes. "The U.S. civil administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has issued an order banning any incitement to violence, including through media outlets, but the reporting of such statements by journalists has so far not been deemed to violate that rule. The council's decision, however, does not include any exemption for simply reporting the statements of resistance groups." This action contrasts a now common administration retort to anti-war hecklers -- used recently by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the National Press Club and yesterday by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at a talk at New York's New School University -- that Iraqis are now also enjoying the right of free speech and a free press.

"The British intelligence chief responsible for a pre-war dossier on Iraq's weapons dropped a key sentence from it days before publication after prompting from Downing Street," Reuters reports. "The offending sentence stated that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was prepared to use chemical and biological weapons 'if he believes his regime is under threat.'" John Scarlett, chairman of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee, told the inquiry into the suicide of Iraq weapons expert David Kelly that the phrase was dropped from the September 2002 dossier on Iraq at the suggestion of Jonathan Powell, chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair. "The revelation that Powell ordered the sentence to be omitted raises fresh doubts over the intervention of Blair's office in the compilation of the September dossier," Reuters reports.

Victoria Clarke, the former Pentagon spokesperson credited with developing its journalist "embedding" strategy during the war in Iraq, has gone to work as a commentator for CNN. Clarke says that the Pentagon ought to reactivate the embedding program to counter negative media reports on the war. What she isn't saying is that the Pentagon cut back the embedding program after troops in the field began talking freely to reporters about morale problems and mismanagement of the war.

An alliance of pesticide and lawn-care industry associations and companies, calling itself the Evergreen Foundation (EF), has raised over $200,000 in seed money for a "national marketing campaign to consumers throughout the United States to promote the economic, environmental and lifestyle benefits of healthy landscapes and green spaces at home, work and play," Lawn & Landscape magazine reports. "Careful use of pesticides and fertilizers, prudent use of water, managing noise and air pollution are among the issues the EF plans to tackle in its campaign. There are coordinated activist efforts in such areas as Canada to New York state, Minnesota and western states to curtail or even eliminate pesticides and fertilizers, severely restrict the use of water and lawns and other efforts detrimental to the green industry and consumers, the foundation believes," L&L writes. Financial contributors to the campaign include Associated Landscape Contractors of America, Bayer Environmental Science, John Deere, Dow AgroSciences, Lawn Doctor, Syngenta, The Toro Co., Turfgrass Producers International, and Weed Man USA among others.

While the Food and Drug Administration is hearing testimonies on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs, one pharmaceutical giant is hoping to gets its spin on drug marketing in the news. The FDA is reviewing DTC guidelines that cover the $2.7 billion that the pharmaceutical industry now spends annually on television, radio and print advertising. Since 1997, drug companies have been able to pitch their products directly to the public, raising concerns about patients demanding drugs they don't need or that are inappropriate. Taking advantages of the news hook, "Pfizer has quietly launched a proactive media-relations initiative to highlight what the company feels are the positive aspects of DTC," PR Week reports. Pfizer has sent out approximately 75 binders containing studies and "surveys from Harvard and MIT, the FDA, and the National Medical Association, as well as some 'myth versus fact sheets'" to media outlets. "It's your classic PR tactic," said Michal Fishman, director of US pharmaceuticals PR for Pfizer. "This is us saying, 'Hi, we're out here. Use us to get the whole story.'"

"White House officials have undermined their own government scientists' research into climate change to play down the impact of global warming," Paul Harris reports in the Observer. "Emails and internal government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue." Evidence includes an email from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to the White House Council on Environmental Quality that "reveals how White House officials wanted the CEI's help to play down the impact of a report last summer by the government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in which the US admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming. ... The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials, including its then head, Christine Whitman. ... The CEI is suing another government climate research body that produced evidence for global warming. The revelation of the email's contents has prompted demands for an investigation to see if the White House and CEI are co-ordinating the legal attack."

"Critics say the Bush administration had no plan for postwar Iraq. In fact, before the war, hundreds of Iraqis were involved in discussions with Washington about securing and stabilizing their country after military action," David Phillips writes in the New York Times. Phillips, deputy director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, continues, "Today's difficulties are not the result of a lack of foresight, but rather of poor judgment by civilians at the Pentagon who counted too much on the advice of one exile -- Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress -- and ignored the views of other, more reliable Iraqi leaders."

When Bush at long last went on record saying there was "no evidence that [Saddam] Hussein was involved with the September 11th" attacks, it seemed like a big story. Of the top US newspapers, however, only the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times put the story on the front page, Editor & Publisher reports. After declaring last week that "the media had failed in its duty to correct the public misperception," E&P reports, "an analysis of most major American newspapers found the story either buried deep within the paper -- or completely absent." For example, USA Today put the story on page 16; the New York Times, page 22; and the Washington Post, page 18. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post ran no story on Bush's statement. "The story was even more dramatic because Bush's remarks came on the heels of an assertion to the contrary made by Vice President Dick Cheney Sunday on NBC's 'Meet the Press,'" E&P writes.

"In 'Meet the Press' last Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney said, 'Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now, for over three years.' That is the latest White House lie,'" the Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson writes. On Tuesday, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) drew attention to Cheney's US Office of Government Ethics public financial disclosure sheets. According to the filings, Cheney received $162,392 in deferred salary in 2002 from Halliburton, the oil and military contracting company he ran before running for vice president. In 2001, Cheney received $205,298. He also is still holding 433,333 stock options. "Five years ago, America was in a tizzy over President Clinton's 'That depends on what the meaning of is, is.' That was over lying about sex. For that, Clinton was impeached. Now, we have a vice president who tells America he has severed his ties even as his umbilical cord doubles his salary. To him, it depends what the meaning of i$, i$," Jackson writes. Halliburton has already amassed $2 billion in no-bid, no-ceiling contracts in Iraq.

"Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie," Chicago Sun-Times' Andrew Greeley writes. "That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself. ... 'War on terror' is a metaphor. It is not an actual war, like the World War or the Vietnamese or Korean wars. It is rather a struggle against fanatical Islamic terrorists, exacerbated if not caused by the conflict in Palestine. When one turns a metaphor into a national policy, one not only misunderstands what is going on, one begins to slide toward the big lie. One invades Iraq because one needed a war."

"Saudi Arabia is denying a published report that it is interested in developing a nuclear weapon, according to a statement released by its PR firm, Qorvis Communications," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. The UK's Guardian, citing unidentified sources, reported that top officials in Riyadh are considering acquiring nuclear capabilities as a defensive strategic option for the kingdom. "Until now, the assumption in Washington was that Saudi Arabia was content to remain under the US nuclear umbrella. But the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US has steadily worsened since the September 11 attacks," the Guardian writes. According to O'Dwyer's, the Qorvis-distributed statement said reports "that the Kingdom is seeking nuclear, biological or chemical weapons are motivated by malice and have no grounding in the truth."

"President Bush said Wednesday that there was no proof tying Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks, amid mounting criticism that senior administration officials have helped lead Americans to believe that Iraq was behind the plot," the Los Angeles Times' Greg Miller writes. "Bush's statement was the latest in a flurry of remarks this week by top administration officials after Vice President Dick Cheney resurrected a number of contentious allegations about Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda in an appearance on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday. ... Bush's comments were his most direct on the issue to date. He drew a clear distinction between alleged Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and the lack of evidence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. That is a distinction administration officials did not emphasize in the months before the war. ... A reading of the record shows that while senior administration officials stopped short of accusing Hussein of complicity in the attacks, they frequently alluded to the possibility of such a connection, and consistently cast the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda in stronger terms than many in the intelligence community seemed to endorse."

Curious about who owns your local media, telephone and cable company? The Center for Public Integrity has created a searchable database that contains basic information on every radio and television station in America as well as every cable television system and telephone company. You can search by company, by call sign or by area. Searchers will find basic information on some of the most important telecommunication companies, including a brief corporate profile and basic financial information. This dataset also includes all industry sponsored trips by FCC officials between May 1995 and March 2003 (including $84,921 in trips by FCC Chairman Michael Powell to places such as Las Vegas, New Orleans, Honolulu and London).

US Secretary of State Colin Powell was a military PR man in Vietnam. One of his assignments was to help manage the image crisis created by the massacre of civilians by US troops at My Lai. Now, as the Bush government increasingly uses Saddam Hussein's brutality as its primary rationalization for the war, Powell is revising and spinning history by traveling to Halabja, the site of Saddam's gassing of Iraqi Kurds. Powell dedicated a memorial and declared that the world should have acted sooner against Saddam after the 1988 massacre. However, as we point out in our book Weapons of Mass Deception, when the 1988 gassings took place at Halabja Colin Powell was the National Security Advisor for the Reagan/Bush administration and Saddam was the Reagan and then Bush administration's strategic ally. Saddam's chemicals, now called WMDs, came from the US and other western countries. When the US Congress attempted to act against Saddam, Colin Powell and the rest of the Reagan/Bush administration made sure that the Prevention of Genocide Act died in Congress.

"Determined to change the tone of the national debate over Iraq, the White House and Republicans in Congress launched a tightly coordinated effort last week to begin providing the media with stories of American progress in the still-turbulent country," PR Week's Douglas Quenqua reports. "Members of Congress came back [from the August recess] with this sense of frustration that the positive stories weren't being told, or at least weren't being heard," said Roy Blunt, communications director to House majority leader Tom Delay (R-TX). "On the House side, you have 229 Republican members who can be a very powerful megaphone that hasn't been utilized." The effort is aimed to help get passed Bush's request for $87 billion for Iraq and to counter flagging public opinion concerning the US occupation. White House communications director Dan Bartlett is working with GOP "message leaders" to develop new tactics. "National security advisor Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the Foreign Press Center on Wednesday to highlight accomplishments in Iraq, including the number of Iraqis now participating in the patrolling of their own country," Quenqua writes.

In August, the White House announced what it called a "big impact" plan to overwhelm and silence critics of its failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, with former UNSCOM inspector David Kay assigned to compile a big, impactful report that would answer questions once and for all. According to a Monday report on ABC News, however, a draft version of Kay's report provides no solid evidence that Iraq had such arms when the United States invaded. Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix now believes Iraq destroyed all its weapons 10 years ago. That hasn't stopped administration officials like Dick Cheney from continuing efforts at spin control. FAIR/Extra! has compiled some examples of the role that journalists themselves played in hyping the WMD story.

"CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN 'was intimidated' by the Bush administration and Fox News, which 'put a climate of fear and self-censorship,'" USA Today's Peter Johnson writes. Appearing on CNBC's "Topic A With Tina Brown" with other guests comedian Al Franken and former Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke, Amanpour told Brown that is wasn't a question of being able to do certain stories and not do others. "It's a question of being rigorous. It's really a question of really asking the questions. All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it's the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels," Amanpour said.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has released an updated report chronicling the effects the war on terrorism has had on the public's right to know. The 89-page report, called "Homefront Confidential: How the War on Terrorism Affects Access to Information and the Public's Right to Know," outlines actions taken over the last two years by state and federal government agencies that limit the ability of journalists to do their jobs.

Michels Warren, a PR firm in Adelaide, Australia, is collecting up to $107,000 from the Federal Government to sell the merits of a planned radioactive waste dump in South Australia.

"Nike said today that although it has settled the suit brought against it by California consumer activist Mark Kasky, it still intends to curtail its corporate PR efforts, including the continued suspension of its social-responsibility reporting initiative," PR Week reports. "Despite the settlement, which was announced this morning, Nike said it does not plan to ramp up the PR activities that had been curtailed because of the pending lawsuit. ... Nike has also decided not to issue its corporate-responsibility report for fiscal year 2002." The suit stemmed from a Nike campaign to defend itself from charges that it used sweatshop labor. Kasky sued Nike in 1998 under California truth-in-advertising laws saying Nike's claims were false. Nike said its statements on its overseas factories are protected speech. The California Supreme court, however, disagreed with Nike, saying its campaign did qualify as commercial speech. The US Supreme court decided not to rule on Nike's appeal. Nike admits no liability with the settlement that will see $1.5 million dollars going to the Fair Labor Association.

"After a failed advertising campaign in the Middle East and then the war in Iraq, which most people in the region opposed, the Bush administration is struggling to find a better way to communicate," reports Sonni Efron. "Plans call for new messages as well as new messengers - including launching an Arabic-language satellite television station to compete with Qatar-based Al Jazeera. The administration's critics argue that the United States can do little to improve its image without major changes in unpopular policies, especially its close alliance with Israel. But some conservatives blame the State Department for doing a bad job of selling what should be an appealing message of freedom and democracy." The U.S. spends $1 billion per year to polish its image abroad, but according to pollster John Zogby, who studies public opinion in many Arab nations, American popularity there has hit "rock bottom." Similar sentiments are being expressed "from Africa to Europe to Southeast Asia," according to the New York Times.

"In two years since the terrorist attacks," writes Keith McKnight, "journalists across the country have found themselves losing access to government-held information on various matters - much of which has nothing to do with national security."

Humorous columnist Dave Barry is driving telemarketers nuts with his recent column that published the toll-free number for their lobby group, the American Teleservices Association. Barry encouraged readers to call the ATA "to tell them what you think" about telemarketers. Thousands of readers took Barry up on his suggestion, and 10 days later, they're still calling. "I feel just terrible, especially if they were eating or anything," Barry says.

Following recent revelations that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency misled the public about air quality in New York following the 9/11 terrorist attack, the New York Daily News has been crowing about how columnist Juan González "was the first to sound the alarm" that ground zero was a toxic dump after 9/11. As Cynthia Cotts points out, however, the newspaper "was not always so crazy about González's scoop. Indeed, sources say, ... editors discouraged the columnist from pursuing the toxic story and buckled under pressure from federal and local authorities."

Weapons of Mass Deception is currently ranked #23 on the New York Times' best seller list, its third week on that list. Check out some of its recent reviews. Authors Sheldon Rampton and/or John Stauber are on the road the last half of September for book talks in San Francisco (9/15), Sebastopol (9/16), Berkeley (9/17), and Corte Madera (9/18), California. Then back to Wisconsin to Richland Center (9/22), Madison (9/23), Milwaukee (9/24), and finally Duluth, Minnesota on September 26. For more information see our events page.

Alternative sources of news such as the Internet have made readers "more assertive and far less in awe of the press" than before, writes Jay Rosen. He highlights the case of Chris Allbritton, a former AP and New York Daily News reporter who became "the Web's first independent war correspondent," raising donor funds to support his weblog reporting on Iraq. "The Internet did the rest," Rosen writes. "On March 27, his reporting drew 23,000 users to his site, thus proving, not that anyone in the public can perhaps be a journalist, but that anyone who is a journalist can have a mini-public on the Net." Unlike traditional journalism, Albritton's site also lets readers participate as journalists themselves, as in the recent exchange between Sheldon Rampton and Australian journalist Eric Campbell regarding TV cameraman Paul Moran's relationship to the Rendon Group.

"Just like in the old days, the military wants you," writes Beth Snyder Bulik. "But these days, Uncle Sam has a better pitch. With the help of big-time ad agencies and sleek messages, the stalwart armed services have modernized their marketing and advertising o and attracted a new generation of recruits in the process." Tactics used to promote its "Army of One" slogan have included interactive games on the Internet and sponsorship of a NASCAR race car.

"Some time in the next two weeks, David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group, is expected to finally release a crucial report on his findings so far in his search for weapons of destruction," writes Greg Mitchell. "Since no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) have been found in Iraq, close observers now report that Kay is likely to drop on the media a massive weapon of his own: hundreds or thousands of pages of summaries and documents purporting to prove that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. ... Kay thereby will "flood the zone" and hope the press portrays what may be largely assertion -- not fact -- as compelling proof. Would the media possibly fall for this? There are disturbing indications that they would." After all, journalist did it before when they rolled over and accepted Colin Powell's now-discredited speech last summer to the United Nations.

"Salam Pax," the already-legendary writer of a Baghdad-based weblog, tells how his site began as "an internet joke with a friend in Jordan" and grew to become the most famous web diary in the world. Despite Saddam Hussein's censorship of the Internet, he writes, "the internet offered a wealth of tunnelling software to download, little programs which allowed you to make tiny holes in the firewall through which you could access blocked sites." Blogs in particular seemed to fly below the censors' radar: "I preferred to believe they were not watching. They were never patient. If they knew about it I would already have been hanging from a ceiling being asked about anti-governmental activities. ... By the end of January war felt very close and the blog was being read by a huge number of people. There were big doubts that I was writing from Baghdad, the main argument being there was no way such a thing could stay under the radar for so long in a police state. I really have no idea how that happened. I have no idea whether they knew about it or not. I just felt that it was important that among all the weblogs about Iraq and the war there should be at least one Iraqi blog, one single voice: no matter how you view my politics, there was at least someone talking." Today several blogs are available from Iraqis as well as individual U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq, using colorful pseudonyms such as Baghdad Burning, Turning Tables, Chief Wiggles, and Chrome Dome.

"Major US corporations ranging from Pfizer to Halliburton are mobilizing scores of public affairs professionals across Washington this fall in hopes that the new legislative session will bring an end to years of costly asbestos-related lawsuits," PR Week's Douglas Quenqua writes. "Working separately as the Asbestos Study Group (ASG) and the Asbestos Alliance (AA), hundreds of major companies that have either manufactured or used asbestos are lobbying for protection from more than 600,000 asbestos lawsuits now pending in US courts. A bill that would create a $108 billion trust fund from which victims could receive compensation is expected to be considered by the Senate this fall. Many in Congress consider the bill, which would also bar future asbestos-related lawsuits, a high priority, but newly revived debates over energy policy and Iraq threaten to sidetrack the long-simmering issue. Hence, a vast army of public affairs professionals is mobilizing to preserve the momentum."

"HBO is turning its lens on the Beltway this week with the debut of a new reality-based series about Washington lobbyists," PR Week reports. "K Street mixes working politicians and lobbyists, including the likes of Michael Deaver, Mary Matalin, and James Carville, with a cast of actors playing lobbyists. ... The 10-part series from executive producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh will grab plotlines from the headlines, and film only one week in advance in an attempt to remain as timely as possible. For example, a 20-minute test episode shown to critics features a story that revolves around a lobbying firm's decision on whether or not to represent Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi. Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) make cameos, and show producers say they plan on recruiting other DC insiders. While some in the Beltway might crave their 15 minutes, the idea of having real clients appear in fictional plots makes others nervous. Burson-Marsteller, which had a State Department contract for four years providing communications support for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which is led by Chalabi, worries that an inaccurate portrayal could harm its clients' images."

"Every president deceives. But each has his own style of deceit," writes Joshua Micah Marshall. The Bush administration, he says, specializes in "a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. ... Many of the administration's policy arguments have amounted to predictions - tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower - that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn't be definitely disproven until events played out in the future."

"Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that [Iraq's Saddam] Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll. That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents. ... The poll's findings are significant because they help to explain why the public continues to support operations in Iraq despite the setbacks and bloodshed there. Americans have more tolerance for war when it is provoked by an attack, particularly one by an all-purpose villain such as Hussein. 'That's why attitudes about the decision to go to war are holding up,' [Andrew] Kohut said.

"US popularity has plummeted in the Arab and Muslim world despite a nearly two-year-old State Department campaign to boost the US image, according to a Congress report," the Australian Financial Review reports. "Despite anecdotal claims of success with certain elements of the campaign in some countries, polling data shows the United States is more unpopular and more resented in many Muslim-majority nations than before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the report said." According to the September 4 General Accounting Office report "U.S. Public Diplomacy: State Department Expands Efforts but Faces Significant Challenges," public affairs officers felt they had "insufficient resources" to do their job and that administrative tasks were "burdensome." GAO also found that one fifth of officers assigned overseas lacked the language skills to do their job.

"Gosh, I thought this was just some lunatic conspiracy theory," comments Tom Tomorrow, the world's best cartoonist. (We're not just saying that because he drew the cover art for several of our books.) We thought it was a conspiracy theory too, but now the New York Times is reporting that "Top White House officials personally approved the evacuation of dozens of influential Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, from the United States in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when most flights were still grounded." The Snopes web site, which normally does a good job of debunking urban legends, should also have to eat some crow for the ferocity with which it ridiculed Michael Moore for talking about this back when everyone, us included, thought this was too outrageous to be true.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who has spearheaded efforts to abolish limits on media concentration, recently spoke to Newt Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation and shared his thoughts with the Online Journalism Review. Thanks to the Internet, he says, "the problem in society is not concentration and scarcity [of information media] but actually abundance, fragmentation and hyper competition. There's so much of it the audience is getting fragmented across so many different media that they're very hard to reach and hold onto. When I was a kid, there were three networks. and if you had me you could hold me a while. My kids swing that remote control like it's a pistol, and two seconds into a show, if they are not entertained, you're gone. ... If you're an advertiser chasing my son, you're trying to chase him around this whole electronic sphere. It's because there's so much, because it's so fragmented." (And that's a problem?)

"Democrats and moderate Republicans alike are accusing Bush of having the worst environmental record in history -- of surreptitiously tearing down the regulatory framework that yielded vast improvements in the nation's air and water quality and land conservation over the last 30 years," writes Amanda Griscom. In response to growing criticism of its environmental policies, the administration has "made every effort to finesse its public-relations strategy, but none whatsoever to change its approach to environmental policies themselves. ... The same high-level image-makers who had Bush somersaulting onto an aircraft carrier on its way home from the Persian Gulf have also been meticulously controlling the public image of Bush's environmental agenda."

"Let me make sure I've got this right," says Gary Kamiya. "After being insulted, belittled and called irrelevant by the swaggering machos in the Bush administration, the United Nations is now supposed to step forward to supply cannon fodder for America's disastrous Iraq occupation - while the U.S. continues to run the show? In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an invasion it bitterly opposed."

The Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera has launched its English-language web site, five months after hackers brought down a temporary site at the height of the Iraq war.

"A secret report for the Joint Chiefs of Staff lays the blame for setbacks in Iraq on a flawed and rushed war-planning process that 'limited the focus' for preparing for post-Saddam Hussein operations," the Washington Times' Rowan Scarborough reports. "The report, prepared last month, said the search for weapons of mass destruction was planned so late in the game that it was impossible for U.S. Central Command to carry out the mission effectively." The Times writes it obtained a copy of the "secret" report "Operation Iraqi Freedom Strategic Lessons Learned." "The report also provides a classified timeline of events from September 11 leading to war. It says that on Aug. 29, 2002, Mr. Bush 'approves Iraq goals, objectives and strategy,'" Scarborough writes.

"Two top Environmental Protection Agency officials who were deeply involved in easing an air pollution rule for old power plants just took private-sector jobs with firms that benefit from the changes," Knight Ridder's Seth Boronstein reports. "Days after the changes in the power-plant pollution rule were announced last week, John Pemberton, the chief of staff in the EPA's air and radiation office, told colleagues he would be joining Southern Co., an Atlanta-based utility that's the nation's No. 2 power-plant polluter and was a driving force in lobbying for the rule changes. Southern Co., which gave more than $3.4 million in political contributions over the past four years while it sought the changes, hired Pemberton as director of federal affairs." Also departing EPA is Ed Krenik, associate administrator for congressional affairs. Krenik joined Bracewell & Patterson, a top Houston-based law firm that coordinated lobbying for several utilities on easing the power-plant pollution rule and houses the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which advocated for rule changes the EPA just enacted. The revolving door goes both ways. Another EPA air and radiation administrator, Jeffrey Holmstead, previously worked as a lawyer and lobbyist for chemical companies and industry groups seeking looser pollution standards.

A Canadian meat packing plant has retained the Primary Counsel Group, a PR firm, to help answer allegations that it has been processing and selling "deadstock" - dead and condemned animals deemed unfit for human consumption. About four dozen people have reported stomach ailments after eating meats produced by Aylmer Meat Packers, which has a long history of previous health and food safety violations and had its license pulled last week pending a government investigation.

"U.S. battlefield casualties in Iraq are increasing dramatically in the face of continued attacks by remnants of Saddam Hussein's military and other forces, with almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared 'wounded in action,'" the Washington Post's Vernon Lobe writes. With so many troops wounded in action and attacks on soldiers becoming "commonplace," U.S. Central Command only releases the number of wounded when asked -- "making the combat injuries of U.S. troops in Iraq one of the untold stories of the war," Lobe writes. "Since the war began, more than 6,000 service members have been flown back to the United States. The number includes the 1,124 wounded in action, 301 who received non-hostile injuries in vehicle accidents and other mishaps, and thousands who became physically or mentally ill."

"Iraq may be spinning out of control, but in the Bush administration, the spin was strictly controlled," writes Evan Thomas. "From Baghdad to the White House, administration spokesmen went to elaborate lengths to argue that the presence of terrorists in Iraq was somehow a positive development." According to a recent Newsweek opinion poll, Bush's approval ratings are declining, and 69 percent of Americans worry that the United States will be bogged down for many years in Iraq without making much progress in achieving its goals. Bad news is also penetrating the public consciousness as families of soldiers stationed in Iraq are shocked by the emails they are getting back from the front lines. "If you're a military commander, e-mail is the worst thing ever invented," complains Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.