social justice

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 why we should pity the oil industry, how invasion of privacy is sold as a good thing, and kids fighting back. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at Philip Morris's ability to see into the future. 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!

The proposed Food and Drug Administration tobacco bill currently under consideration would ban artificial flavors like cinnamon and cherry from cigarettes, but strangely gives special protection to menthol. Public health advocates wonder why menthol has been exempted from the bill, especially when it masks the harsh taste of cigarettes for beginners. A 2006 study also showed that menthol makes it harder for addicted smokers to quit. Menthol brands are also disproportionately popular among African Americans; seventy percent of blacks smoke menthols, compared to only 30 percent of whites. While African Americans smoke less than whites overall, they suffer higher rates of cancer and other tobacco-induced diseases. Despite all this, legislators believe that menthol cannot be eliminated as a cigarette flavoring under the bill because menthol is crucial to the $70 billion cigarette market. It is of particular importance to Philip Morris, which has been planning for, and driving FDA regulation of cigarettes since 1999. The watered-down terms resulted from legislators' belief that the bill won't pass without PM's buy-in.

Author Eric Schlosser editorializes about "the growing threat to civil liberties posed by corporate spying," citing Burger King Corporation's spying on the Student/Farmworker Alliance and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers through Cara Schaffer and her private security firm, Diplomatic Tactical Services. "The Bill of Rights was adopted to protect Americans from the abusive power of their government. I've come to believe that we now need a similar set of restrictions to defend against irresponsible corporate power. Today companies like Wal-Mart and ExxonMobil have annual revenues larger than the entire budgets of some states, and they employ former agents from the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the Secret Service to do security work," Schlosser writes. "John Chidsey, the chief executive of Burger King, knew about the use of Diplomatic Tactical Services. Mr. Chidsey should get a chance to raise his right hand and tell members of Congress why he thinks this sort of behavior is acceptable." Meanwhile, Burger King says it is "investigating online postings made by one of its vice presidents vilifying the Coalition of Immokalee Workers," reports the Fort Myers News-Press.

Sludge keeps rearing its ugly head. Scientists used federal grant money to "spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil." The residents were not alerted to any harmful ingredients in the sludge, and were assured that it posed no health risks for their families. In exchange for participating in the 2005 study, nine families were given food coupons and a free lawn by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Freedom of Information Act requests by the Associated Press produced grant documents, but none showed any medical follow-up with the homeowners. The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted similar research in East St. Louis, Illinois, another impoverished and predominantly African American community. "Thomas Burke, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says epidemiological studies have never been done to show whether spreading sludge on land is safe. 'There are potential pathogens and chemicals that are not in the realm of safe. What's needed are more studies on what's going on with the pathogens in sludge - are we actually removing them? The commitment to connecting the dots hasn't been there.'"

A British county has been using an anti-terrorism law enacted in 2000 to spy on minors for petty crimes like using cigarettes and alcohol. The Staffordshire County Council in Britain's Midlands region has been using Britain's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) for a host of non-terrorism-related applications, like monitoring underage liquor and tobacco sales, recording the movements of farm animals and tracking counterfeit DVD sales. Brandon Cooke, Staffordshire County Council's Fraud and Community Safety Manager, defended the Council's use of surveillance under RIPA by saying the operations were crucial for "combatting antisocial behavior."

From Dove's new websiteIn 2004, the Unilever company Dove got lots of attention for using "ordinary-looking -- in some cases heavyset -- women in its ads for shampoos and beauty products. The ad and public-relations effort, called 'Campaign for Real Beauty,' created free publicity for the company." Now, Dove is "trying to create a new online community for women that offers entertainment, blogs, advice and advertising." The website was designed by the WPP firm Ogilvy, to "strengthen the link" between the Campaign's empowerment rhetoric "and Dove's line of products." To date, the Campaign's "marketing impact has been somewhat blunted by the fact that the social cause hasn't been linked directly to specific Dove products." Dove's new site will face competition from similar corporate-sponsored, woman-focused websites. Yahoo recently launched "Shine," designed to give "the struggling Internet company additional opportunities to sell advertising targeted to the key decision-maker in many households," reports AP. And Kraft has "uPumpItUp," a so-called "cause initiative for the Crystal Light brand."

Fear-driven marketing gets resultsThe Second Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals missed a great opportunity this week to hold the tobacco industry accountable for one of its worst marketing tactics -- positioning cigarette brands in response to smokers' medical concerns. The April 7, 2008, issue of the New York Times has an article about the dismissal of a huge, class-action lawsuit against the tobacco industry that was brought by smokers of "light" cigarettes who claimed they were misled about the relative safety of "light" cigarettes compared to regular, "full flavor" cigarettes. The suit, and its dismissal by the court, brought to mind a little-recognized tobacco industry marketing survival tactic that weighs heavily on the public's perception of exactly what "light" means.

The tobacco industry has long had a remarkable ability to rescue itself from damaging health claims by turning allegations against its products into marketing opportunities. Inside the industry, the fact that cigarettes cause widespread illness and death is referred to as the "smoking and health" issue, or "S&H issue" for short. Tobacco marketers consider "S&H issues" to be little more than "external marketing forces" that require re-positioning of products, through changes in advertising copy strategy, so that smokers will get an illusion of safety from the dangers they perceive.

"I've never been on the opposite side of the NAACP," said Dr. Alicia Fernandez, an associate professor of clinical medicine. "I've been a big admirer of the SEIU" labor union. "But now these drug companies are going to the good guys for cover." In particular, the SEIU affiliate International Association of EMTs and Paramedics (IAEP) recently sent two letters to its members promoting Pfizer's cholesterol drug Lipitor. "IAEP leadership stands behind LIPITOR as the lipid-lowering agent of choice," read one letter, which was signed by IAEP director Matthew Levy and printed on IAEP letterhead, but with a Pfizer copyright at the end. IAEP stated it "does not endorse specific drugs," but refused to say whether the union has any financial relationship with Pfizer. In a similar case, the NAACP's New England branch accused Medicare of racism for refusing to cover the heart medication BiDil. (NitroMed, BiDil's manufacturer, has donated $1.5 million to the NAACP.) BiDil is a combination of two generic drugs that won "patent protection for treating African-American patients with heart failure." Fernandez believes NitroMed's "real goal" is "selling an expensive 'new' pill made from two cheap old ones." Meanwhile, she warned, "the argument over coverage of BiDil deflects attention from the real issues involved in health disparities."

Ward ConnerlyPeople in Colorado who signed an anti-affirmative action ballot initiative petition are charging that petition circulators deceived them about the measure's real purpose and intent. The signature-gathering effort is part of a push by African-American conservative Ward Connerly to qualify ballot initiatives in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma that would end affirmative action policies and programs in those states. Signature-gatherers for Connerly's measure, which is deceptively titled the "Colorado Civil Rights Initiative," reportedly approached people in the Denver metro area by asking them whether they were "against discrimination." If a person answered "yes," they were asked to sign a petition that they were told would legally end discrimination in their state. Many signers were upset later when they discovered that the "Civil Rights Initiative" was really an effort to end existing affirmative action programs and policies that help level the playing field for groups like minorities and women, that historically have suffered the most from discrimination in employment, contracts and educational opportunities.

In the spring of 2007, when author Ted Nace set out to profile the emerging No New Coal Plants movement for Orion magazine, he had no idea that the assignment would turn into more than just a single article.

Nace had become interested in the anti-coal movement after reading an article in The Nation magazine, in which NASA's chief climate scientist James E. Hansen warned that another decade of continued growth in greenhouse gases would "guarantee" enough dramatic climate change to produce what Hansen called "a different planet." Hansen made it clear that the most important step that needed to be taken to avoid such a consequence was an immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power plants.

The Power of the Swarm

As Nace explored the anti-coal movement, he found that some of the most effective work was being done by small, rurally-based, grassroots groups linked together informally through computer networks. His Orion article, "Stopping Coal in Its Tracks," noted that in many cases this decentralized "swarm" had been more militant and more effective than the large groups known as Big Green.

Nace set up the website Coal Moratorium Now! to organize the information he was gathering on coal, then recruited two researchers, Meilin Chin and Michelle Chandra, to help him track down the status of every proposed coal plant they could locate. As word of the coal plants database spread, several people proposed moving it onto a wiki so that it could be more easily accessed and edited by multiple researchers.