media

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 radio shows on drugs, when U.S. think tanks meddle overseas, and mad policies on mad cow. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at Dow's chemical legacy. 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!

"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.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is suing NextClick Media, Inc., an Internet advertising company, over Web sites they operate that offered "free 10-day trials" of an herbal stop-smoking patch called "Nicocure," "Stop Smoking 180" and "Zero Nicotine." The sites claimed the product worked better than nicotine patches and had a "97% success rate." People who signed up for the "free trial" got a 30-day supply instead of a 10-day supply, then were told they had to pay for all 30 days if they chose to keep it. If they returned the product, they were assessed a $7.95 restocking fee. People who agreed to the "free trial" also found themselves enrolled in a "continuity program" that automatically billed their credit or debit card a monthly charge of up to $99.95 until they canceled. Customers found contacting the company to get out of the arrangement nearly impossible. None of the costly terms of the "free trial" were disclosed on the company's Web sites. After the FTC sued the company, NextClick agreed to halt its deceptive practices.

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.

Buried in junk mail...what to do?A recent blog about the pro-junk mail lobby and its front group, Mail Moves America, drew many comments. Mail Moves America is a coalition of businesses that oppose efforts to create a legislated "Do Not Mail" list to protect citizens from being showered with unwanted junk mail,Junk mail is clearly a hot topic that arouses strong emotions on all sides. As electronic mail moves closer to overtaking paper mail as the medium of choice for written communication, it is clear that the Post Office remains an essential way to communicate and transfer goods. Still, many people are overwhelmed with junk mail and have little idea how to stop it.

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.

As part of its plan to expand online "information operations," the Pentagon is launching "a global network of foreign-language news websites ... and hiring local journalists to write current events stories and other content that promote U.S. interests," reports Peter Eisler. The Pentagon launched Matawani.com last year, an Arabic-language site with Iraq news; other sites are being developed for Asian and Latin American audiences. Like the Pentagon's older "news" sites, aimed at North Africa and Southeast Europe, the new sites only disclose U.S. Defense Department involvement on a single page reached via a small "about" link at the bottom of the site. The goal of the Pentagon's "Trans Regional Web Initiative" is to launch "a minimum of six" websites run by regional U.S. military commands. Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers said, "Our adversaries use the Internet to great advantage," so the Pentagon must counter their messages with "truthful information, and these websites are a good vehicle." Harvard University's Marvin Kalb called the websites "deliberate deception" that "weakens the image of journalism as an objective bystander."

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.