Issue Management

Prez Press Room Retrofit Aiming at Message Control?

Technological advances in a refurbished White House Press Room open the door (or wall, actually) to daily presidential video news releases, says Professor Robert Thompson of Syracuse University. "The equivalent of press releases could go out without interruption or analysis," Thompson said of the new "video wall" that likely will be added to the press room when it reopens next year.

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Who's Afraid of Eric Schlosser?

"Who made the edit?" asks Evan Hessel in his Forbes "OutFront" column. "The edit" in Wikipedia's entry on McDonald's Corporation erased a link to Eric Schlosser's highly critical assessment of McDonald's in Fast Food Nation, and replaced it with a link to a more academic tome.

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BBC Archives Reveal Spooks Vetted Staff

Archived internal BBC documents from the 1980's, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph under Freedom of Information legislation, reveal that the British spy service, MI5, was used to vet existing and potential staff at the public broadcaster. The paper reported that the documents revealed that "at one stage it [MI5] was responsible for vetting 6300 BBC posts - almost a third of the total workforce." The BBC adopted "categorical denial" as its "defensive strategy" to deflect questions about the practice by unions.

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Kids to Kraft: Where's the Wheat?

In contrast to the more than $15 billion in direct marketing spent in the U.S. to exhort children to buy food and non-food products, children often don’t get very far with the companies when they start asking questions. Olympia, Washington teacher Michi Thacker assigned her elementary students to write food manufacturers to raise questions, such as where the macaroni comes from.

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Hill and Knowlton: Staring Down Consumer Advocates?

While even Wall Street was getting edgy about increasing reports of a fungal infection pointing to a Bausch and Lomb contact lens solution, the company's PR firm dryly glared at consumer advocates. "Bausch and Lomb has not yet recalled ANY of its products. Rather, its Renu MoistureLoc has been taken off the shelves. Who can I speak to about this inaccuracy?" asked Hill and Knowlton's Grace Healy in an email to Consumeraffairs.com.

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Bush's Perception Management Plan

"George W. Bush has been criticized for disdaining fact in favor of faith in his own instincts. But he is savvy about the dangers that information can present to his authority over the government and the American people," writes Robert Parry. "That is why the first priority of his second term has been the elimination of the few government sources of information that could challenge the images he wants to project to the public. Bush doesn't want the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency portraying his Iraq and other foreign policies as abject failures or reckless adventures.

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