media

Sign displayed at the NEI conferenceI learned many things at the Nuclear Energy Institute's (NEI's) annual meeting, but perhaps none more surprising than this: When nuclear power executives discuss the state of their industry, they highlight many of the same issues as their environmentalist opponents.

Of course, the emphasis and even the language are different. But presenters at the "Nuclear Energy Assembly," held in Chicago from May 5 to 7, discussed financing for new nuclear plants, nuclear waste storage and nuclear weapons proliferation concerns.

Nuclear power opponents argue that the industry shouldn't expect or need government support, some fifty years into its existence. In a hotel conference room populated mostly with gray-suited older white men, industry executives repeatedly called for an expansion of federal loan guarantees for new nuclear plants.

Early on in the conference, NEI president and CEO Frank L. "Skip" Bowman said, "We use loan guarantees in this country to support ship building, steel making, student loans, rural electrification, affordable housing, construction of critical transportation infrastructure, and for many other purposes. Please don't tell me that America's electric infrastructure is any less important." He added, "I wish someone would tell me when the word 'subsidy' became a slur, a four-letter word. ... What is there of value in American life that is not subsidized, to some extent?"

"Prozac Nation: Revisited," a show that aired on U.S. National Public Radio member stations, "featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide. ... All four said that worries ... have been overblown." But the show did not disclose that all four "have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants," or that the series that produced the show, "The Infinite Mind," has received "unrestricted grants" from drug companies including Eli Lilly, the makers of Prozac. One guest, Peter Pitts, heads the industry-funded Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and is "senior vice president for global health affairs at the PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee," which counts among its clients Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and "more than a dozen other pharmaceutical companies." In other drug news, Congressman Bart Stupak held a hearing titled "Direct to Consumer Advertising: Marketing, Education or Deception?" Stupak said "he wants to lay the groundwork for future legislation to tighten controls on drug marketing," reports the Wall Street Journal. The hearing addressed such "recent controversies" as ads for Pfizer's Lipitor, where artificial heart inventor Robert Jarvik "appears to be giving medical advice," and ads for Johnson & Johnson's anemia treatment Procrit that promote off-label uses for the drug.

AdAge reports that Fenton Communications and its client MoveOn.org have announced a politically liberal advertising consortium using corporate advertising executives and firms to "help change the playing field this year. ... At the moment it will go after presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain. ... [David Fenton] said the team would work for a variety of causes, not just MoveOn.org. Fenton also handles public relations for Global Green; Friends of the Earth; Bono's One Campaign; Refugees International; and Human Rights Watch, among others. 'Right now, the idea is to help win the election and talk about issues on global warming and women's rights,' he said." MoveOn's political strategist Tom Matzzie and its founder Wes Boyd also founded Campaign to Defend America, currently running advocacy TV ads against John McCain.

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.

The Pentagon launched its covert media analyst program in 2002, to sell the Iraq war. Later, it was used to sell an image of progress in Afghanistan, whitewash the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and defend the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping, as David Barstow reported in his New York Times expose.

But the pundits weren't just selling government talking points. As Robert Bevelacqua, William Cowan and Carlton Sherwood enjoyed high-level Pentagon access through the analyst program, their WVC3 Group sought "contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq," reported Barstow. Cowan admitted to "push[ing] hard" on a WVC3 contract, during a Pentagon-funded trip to Iraq.

Then there's Pentagon pundit Robert H. Scales Jr. The military firm he co-founded in 2003, Colgen, has an interesting range of clients, from the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Operations Command, to Pfizer and Syracuse University, to Fox News and National Public Radio.

Of the 27 Pentagon pundits named publicly to date, six are registered as federal lobbyists. That's in addition to the less formal -- and less transparent -- boardroom to war-room influence peddling described above. (There are "more than 75 retired officers" who took part in the Pentagon program overall, according to Barstow.)

The Pentagon pundits' lobbying disclosure forms help chart what can only be called a military-industrial-media complex. They also make clear that war is very good for at least some kinds of business.

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at corporate welfare daddies, activist orangutans, and update the Pentagon's pundit scandal. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we travel back in time to Watergate, and campaign donations in small unmarked bills. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!

China's Great Wall - easier than FOI?The Chinese government has unveiled a new regulation that China View, an English language website of the government-owned Xinhua News Agency, reports "includes a 'freedom of information' provision that gives the public, whether individuals or organizations, the right to request government information by making a written application (paper or electronic)." However, Rowan Callick reports in The Australian that a pilot program in three of China's biggest cities in 2004 "indicates the chances of Chinese journalists making use of this embryonic freedom of information regulation are very slim." The only request by a journalist in the trial was from Ma Sheng, a legal affairs reporter for Communist Party-owned Liberation Daily in Shanghai. Ma sought a copy of a map "from a district-level planning bureau where, he believed, a corrupt deal had been made with a developer that involved the removal of many residents to clear the way for luxury apartments." His request was denied and, after several twists in the saga, Ma lost his job. The development went ahead.

Almost two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon's military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Media Matters of America (MMA) reports that, according to a search of the Nexis database, "the three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have still not mentioned the report at all." In contrast, they note, on April 28 all three reported on the controversy over a photo of scantily-clad Miley Cyrus, the star of Disney Channel's Hannah Montana program. "ABC devoted about two and a half minutes to that story, while CBS and NBC each devoted about two minutes to it," MMA reported. The Pew Excellence in Journalism project has a chart showing that " there was virtually no mainstream media follow up to The Times’ expose" with the only national TV coverage being the introduction segment and live debate featuring CMD's John Stauber on the PBS NewsHour. Meanwhile, Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro and three dozen colleagues sent a letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General calling for an investigation of this "propaganda campaign aimed at deliberately misleading the American public."

The Pentagon program's Ken Allard on MSNBCAuthor Glenn Greenwald notes, "It has now been more than ten days since the New York Times exposed the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program involving retired generals and, still, not a single major news network has even mentioned the story to their viewers, let alone responded to the numerous questions surrounding their own behavior." Greenwald helped prod NBC's Brian Williams into at least blogging about this issue, but "the essence of Williams' response [is] he did absolutely nothing wrong. Nor did any of the military analysts used by NBC News. Nor did his network. ... Just consider what is going on here. The core credibility of war reporting by Brian Williams and NBC News has been severely undermined by a major NYT expose. That story involves likely illegal behavior by the Pentagon, in which NBC News appears to have been complicit, resulting in the deceitful presentation of highly biased and conflicted individuals as 'independent' news analysts. Yet they refuse to tell their viewers about any of this, and refuse to address any of the questions that have been raised."

The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week's exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress."

As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, "publicity or propaganda" is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) "covert propaganda." By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.