Lobbying

New Participatory Project: Following Rupert Murdoch's Money Trail

Some of the major shareholders of the Dow Jones company, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, are agonizing over whether to accept a takeover bid from Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate, News Corporation. With steady traffic to the Murdoch-related articles in SourceWatch, it would be good to include details of the donations he and his companies have made to U.S. politicians.

Yes

Bush's Pro-War Front Group, 'Vets for Freedom', Rallies with Republican Senators

Vets for Freedom (VFF), the well-funded pro-war lobby group, is cranking-up its PR campaign on behalf of President Bush's war in Iraq with a news conference held July 17th in the US Capitol. A slate of pro-war Republican Senators including Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, along with former Democratic (now independent) Senator Joe Lieberman, all participated with Pete Hegseth and other VFF lobbyists.

In June 2006, I reported that:

Citizen journalists on SourceWatch have been investigating and exposing the many Republican connections and the partisan pro-war political agenda behind Vets for Freedom,

Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton and Big Tobacco

Mark Penn, CEO of the global PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M) and president of the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates (PSB), feels misunderstood.

Penn was recently in the news when several union officials expressed concern that Democratic Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton had hired him as a "key strategic adviser," even though B-M has a specialist unit that advises clients on defeating union campaigns. Not surprisingly, Clinton's campaign shrugged off the criticism, insisting that he is a "vital member of our team." In an email to Atlantic Online, Penn wrote that that he had "never personally done such [anti-labor] work" and insisted that he has "strong personal sympathies with the labor movement." (Why someone who proclaims their pro-labor sympathies would even head up a PR firm that runs an anti-labor unit went unexplained.) Even if one accepts Penn's explanation at face value, it left me wondering who he had worked for.

A little digging reveals that, for well over two decades, both Penn and his opinion polling company have advised the tobacco industry on how to counter the campaigns of the tobacco control movement. Based on internal tobacco industry documents, it is clear that Penn and his colleagues have little personal sympathy for those promoting policies that put public health ahead of the interests of the tobacco industry.

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