Philip Morris in the Driver's Seat on FDA Tobacco Bill
Submitted by Anne Landman on
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Ethics
Contractors Gone Wild, Media Gone Missing
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Bruce Falconer is calling out the mainstream media for ignoring the disturbing testimony that dominated recent U.S. Senate hearings into corruption by private contractors in Iraq.
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Ohio Governor Snuffs out Ohio Anti-Smoking Foundation
Submitted by Anne Landman on
The Ohio state legislature has seized $230 million from to the state's Tobacco Prevention Foundation and diverted it other uses. In the late 1990s, Ohio and other states sued the major tobacco companies to recover billions of dollars spent treating sick smokers.
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The True Story of a Bogus Blog
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Writing for AdWeek, Andrew Adam Newman reports that a deceptive PR campaign on behalf of the Coach bag company has become "the latest illustration of how a buzz-seeking stunt may backfire." Led by Paul Werth Associates, an Ohio PR firm, the "International AntiCounterfeiting Campaign" (IACC) sought to discourage people from buying knockoff handbags.
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Preying on Smokers Who Want to Quit
Submitted by Anne Landman on
The U.S.
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The New Whopper: Burger with a Side of Spies
Submitted by John Stauber on
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,
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Pentagon's Propaganda Documents Go Online, but Will the TV Networks Ever Report this Scandal?
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.
What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side: Propaganda Meets Corporate Lobbying
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.
Scandal, What Scandal?
Submitted by Bob Burton on
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.
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NPR Acknowledges Pentagon Propaganda Controversy
Submitted by Bob Burton on
One of the over 75 pundits revealed by the New York Times as being part of the Pentagon military analyst program was Robert H.
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