Archive for December 2003

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[eccr] Fwd: The Weekly Spin, Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Wed Dec 10 09:24:07 GMT 2003


>THE WEEKLY SPIN, Wednesday, December 10, 2003
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>The Weekly Spin features selected news summaries with links to
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>THIS WEEK'S NEWS
>
>1. Conservatives Start Dean Attack
>2. New Liberal Radio Network Picks Celebrity PR Man
>3. Wilkinson Returns to White House
>4. Drug Industry Spins Medical Journals Through Ghostwriters
>5. NRA-TV?
>6. Spin Doctors Examine "CSR"
>7. The Perfect Turkey
>8. Media Propagandists Convicted of Genocide in Rwanda
>9. Hollinger's Neoconservative Scandal
>10. Former H&K Exec Still Defends Iraqi Baby Killing Stories
>11. Pushing the Brain's "Buy Button"
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>1. CONSERVATIVES START DEAN ATTACK
>http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/1209shirley.htm
>   "Shirley & Banister Public Affairs is supporting a $100K ad
>   campaign with a PR push for the conservative-backed Club for
>   Growth, which is attacking Democratic presidential front-runner
>   Howard Dean in key primary states," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports.
>   "The firm's national PR support to secure free media play for the
>   ad comes as Dean today struck a blow to his opponents by locking up
>   the endorsement of former Vice President and 2000 Democratic
>   nominee Al Gore. The CFG ad likens Dean to failed Democratic
>   presidential contenders George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael
>   Dukakis. 'For three decades, Democratic presidential candidates
>   have supported huge tax increases,' a voice over begins, over
>   images of the three former nominees, which are later slapped with
>   the word 'Rejected' beside their pictures. 'This year they're
>   back,' it continues. The spot contends Dean says he'll raise taxes
>   on the average family by more than nineteen hundred dollars a year,
>   apparently through his pledge to repeal President George Bush's two
>   major tax cuts since 2001." The ad began running Dec. 4 in Des
>   Moines, Iowa, and Manchester, New Hampshire.
>SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily, December 9, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1070946000
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070946000
>
>2. NEW LIBERAL RADIO NETWORK PICKS CELEBRITY PR MAN
>http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=197451&site=3
>   "Dan Klores Communications is helping to introduce Progress Media's
>   plans for a liberal radio network to an intensely interested, but
>   highly skeptical press," PR Week reports. The agency has been
>   helping shape Progress Media's communications strategy. "The
>   network has been billed as a way of balancing the strong influence
>   of conservative talk radio, but so far media reporters have been
>   wondering aloud why this would be different than other
>   less-than-successful attempts at left-of-center radio programming,
>   such as journalist Jim Hightower's show," PR Week writes. DKC's
>   Matthew Traub explains that Progress Media would provide
>   "programming 24/7" that aims to be, above all, "entertaining,
>   rather than didactic." DKC's list of recent high-profile clients
>   includes Paris Hilton, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, Jennifer Lopez,
>   Britney Spears, Mike Tyson and Lizzie Grubman. According to PR
>   Week, Progress Media is presently in talks with comedians Al
>   Franken and Janeane Garofalo to host programs.
>SOURCE: PR Week, December 8, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070859601
>
>3. WILKINSON RETURNS TO WHITE HOUSE
>http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=197442&site=3
>   "Jim Wilkinson, the well-traveled utility man for the Bush
>   administration's PR team, is returning to the White House," PR
>   Week's Douglas Quenqua writes. "Wilkinson will craft long-term
>   messaging strategy for the National Security Council in the role of
>   deputy national security advisor for communications. He will report
>   to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and White House
>   communications director Dan Bartlett. Most recently, Wilkinson
>   served as communications director for the 2004 Republican
>   Convention, which will take place in New York this August. Prior to
>   that Wilkinson ran communications strategy for General Tommy Franks
>   at US Central Command in Qatar."
>SOURCE: PR Week, December 8, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1070859600
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070859600
>
>4. DRUG INDUSTRY SPINS MEDICAL JOURNALS THROUGH GHOSTWRITERS
>http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1101680,00.html
>   "Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by
>   academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of
>   drug companies," the Observer reports. "The journals, bibles of the
>   profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe
>   and the treatment hospitals provide. But The Observer has uncovered
>   evidence that many articles written by so-called independent
>   academics may have been penned by writers working for agencies
>   which receive huge sums from drug companies to plug their products.
>   Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in
>   journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their
>   names to the papers can be paid handsomely for 'lending' their
>   reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the
>   involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed."
>SOURCE: Observer (UK), December 7, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070773200
>
>5. NRA-TV?
>http://www.msnbc.com/news/1002051.asp?0cv=CB20
>   "Hoping to spend as much as it wants on next year's elections, the
>   National Rifle Association is looking to buy a television or radio
>   station and declare that it should be treated as a news
>   organization, exempt from spending limits in the campaign finance
>   law."
>SOURCE: Associated Press, December 5, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070600401
>
>6. SPIN DOCTORS EXAMINE "CSR"
>http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=197492&site=1
>   "Corporate social responsibility [CSR], and the role that
>   communications plays within it, is a controversial subject. ... So
>   when CSR agency Futerra Sustainability Communications teamed up
>   with communications agency CTN, PRWeek and the IPR to run an online
>   discussion on the issue on 12 November, more than 200 CSR
>   practitioners and communication professionals signed in to express
>   their opinions. ... The irony that one part of a communications
>   business could pronounce on CSR while another division represented
>   Third World dictators [See for example Burson-Marsteller.] was not
>   lost on participants. 'Like all good CSR, it starts internally,'
>   said one debater. 'It's very difficult to have a robust, defensible
>   and enforceable CSR policy in PR if your job is to make big dirty,
>   corporate cock-ups look less bad,' another added. [See for example
>   Ketchum.] A further question was whether CSR was merely a fashion
>   or whether a strong business case had been made that would ensure
>   the field would continue to develop. Sceptics were concerned that
>   companies might soon move onto a new fashion, leaving specialist
>   practitioners looking at an unfriendly job market."
>SOURCE: PR Week, December 5, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1070600400
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070600400
>
>7. THE PERFECT TURKEY
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33090-2003Dec3.html
>   The Washington Post reports the picture-perfect turkey George W.
>   Bush held in front-page photos of his Thanksgiving jaunt to Baghdad
>   was actually a decoration. Instead of being served slices of the
>   golden-brown bird by the President, troops were served from
>   cafeteria steam trays. "White House officials do not deny that they
>   craft elaborate events to showcase Bush, but they maintain that
>   these events are designed to accurately dramatize his policies and
>   to convey qualities about him that are real," the Post writes.
>   "This was effective, because it captured something about the
>   president that people know is true, that he really cares about the
>   soldiers and gets emotional when he sees them," Mary Matalin, a
>   former administration official, said about the trip to Baghdad.
>   "You have to figure out how to capture the Bush we know, even if it
>   doesn't come through in a speech situation or a press conference.
>   He regularly rejects anything that is not him." In a related
>   development, the White House has changed its story that there had
>   been an exchange between a British Airways pilot and Air Force One
>   as it flew to Baghdad. British Airways denied that its pilots had
>   contacted Air Force One. In response, White House communications
>   director Dan Bartlett said he'd left the wrong impression, telling
>   reporters that the British Airways pilot had actually radioed the
>   tower in London. British Airways again denied the story, telling
>   media "that none of its pilots has come forward to acknowledge
>   either making or overhearing the purported conversation."
>SOURCE: Washington Post, December 4, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1070514001
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070514001
>
>8. MEDIA PROPAGANDISTS CONVICTED OF GENOCIDE IN RWANDA
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/04/international/africa/04RWAN.html
>   "In the first case of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an
>   international court [convened in Tanzania] convicted three Rwandans
>   of genocide for media reports that fostered the killing of about
>   800,000 Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi minority, over several months
>   in 1994. A three-judge panel said the three men had used a radio
>   station and a newspaper published twice a month to mobilize
>   Rwanda's Hutu majority against the Tutsi, who were massacred at
>   churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks. The court said the
>   newspaper "poisoned the minds" of readers against the Tutsi, while
>   the radio station openly called for their extermination, luring
>   victims to killing grounds and broadcasting the names of people to
>   be singled out."
>SOURCE: New York Times, December 4, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070514000
>
>9. HOLLINGER'S NEOCONSERVATIVE SCANDAL
>http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2044512
>   Hollinger International Inc., a newspaper publisher caught up in a
>   widening financial scandal, is looking into an investment the
>   company made to a venture capital fund with links to
>   neoconservative defense adviser Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger,
>   both directors of the company. The investigation is part of a wider
>   probe at the company which has already resulted in the resignation
>   of several senior executives, including Canadian-born press baron
>   Conrad Black as Hollinger International's CEO. However, Black
>   remains chairman and controlling shareholder of the Chicago-based
>   company, which publishes the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Telegraph
>   in London and The Jerusalem Post. Hollinger International is also
>   reviewing its annual contribution of some $200,000 to The National
>   Interest, a conservative quarterly magazine that also has links to
>   Perle and Kissinger. According to PR Week, Hollinger has hired Bell
>   Pottinger Communications in the UK and Kekst and Company in New
>   York to handle the public relations fallout from the scandal.
>SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, December 3, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1070427600
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070427600
>
>10. FORMER H&K EXEC STILL DEFENDS IRAQI BABY KILLING STORIES
>http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/02/1540237
>   Democracy Now! featured a debate between Lauri Fitz-Pegado, the
>   account supervisor for Hill & Knowlton's PR campaign on behalf of
>   "Citizens for a Free Kuwait," and John Stauber, co-author of
>   Weapons Of Mass Deception and Toxic Sludge Is Good For You.
>   Citizens for a Free Kuwait was a front group for the Kuwaiti
>   government and royal family. Hill & Knowlton's received over ten
>   million dollars to organize a massive PR campaign to make sure the
>   US went to war in 1991 to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Democracy Now!
>   notes that "on October 10, 1990, a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl,
>   identified simply as Nayirah testified in front of the
>   Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she had personally witnessed
>   15 infants taken from incubators by Iraqi forces who she said,
>   'left the babies on the cold floor to die.' What was not said at
>   the time is that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
>   to the US, Saud Nasir al-Sabah." This sensational baby-killing
>   claim was echoed by politicians and the media to justify the US war
>   against Iraq, and is credited as turning the US Senate debate in
>   favor of war. Later investigations by Amnesty International,
>   Physicians for Human Rights, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
>   Fifth Estate, authors John MacArthur (Second Front), Randal Marlin
>   (Propaganda & the Ethics of Persuasions) and others found that the
>   baby killing claims could not be documented and were likely
>   concocted for propaganda purposes.
>SOURCE: Democracy Now, December 2, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1070341200
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070341200
>
>11. PUSHING THE BRAIN'S "BUY BUTTON"
>http://www.commercialalert.org/index.php/category_id/1/subcategory_id/82/article_id/205
>   Commercial Alert and prominent psychology experts sent a letter
>   today to Emory University President James Wagner, requesting that
>   Emory stop conducting neuromarketing experiments on human subjects.
>   Neuromarketing is a controversial new field of marketing that maps
>   the brain's activation responses in order prod desires for
>   particular products. It seeks, in the words of Forbes magazine, to
>   "find a buy button inside the skull." According to the Commercial
>   Alert letter, this marketing technique "sounds like something that
>   could have happened in the former Soviet Union, for the purposes of
>   behavior control. Yet it is happening right here in America."
>SOURCE: Commercial Alert, December 1, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1070254800
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1070254800
>
>
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