Archive for December 2003

(From 2002 until 2005, this mailing list was called the ECCR mailing list)
[Previous message][Next message][Back to index]

[eccr] The Weekly Spin, Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Wed Dec 24 08:18:42 GMT 2003


>THE WEEKLY SPIN, Wednesday, December 24, 2003
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>sponsored by PR WATCH (www.prwatch.org)
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>The Weekly Spin features selected news summaries with links to
>further information about current public relations campaigns.
>It is emailed free each Wednesday to subscribers.
>
>SHARE US WITH A FRIEND (OR FIFTY FRIENDS)
>Who do you know who might want to receive Spin of the Week?
>Help us grow our subscriber list!  Just forward this message to
>people you know, encouraging them to sign up at this link:
>
>http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>THIS WEEK'S NEWS
>
>1. Mad Cow USA: The Nightmare Is Here
>2. Humans Eating Downer Cows
>3. Tried By the Media
>4. The Killing in Shilling
>5. Black's Hacks
>6. Keeping Secrets
>7. The Governator's Judgment Day
>8. Thank You, Molly Ivins !
>9. GM Watch Exposes 'The Biotech Brigade'
>10. MADD's Dash of Brandy
>11. "Fearless Pursuit of Truth"? Hah!
>12. White House Web Scrubbing
>13. No WMDs?  No Big Deal, Says Bush
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>1. MAD COW USA: THE NIGHTMARE IS HERE
>http://www.prwatch.org/books/madcow.html
>   Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's 1997 book Mad Cow USA warned
>   that unless the US adopted the same strict regulations implemented
>   in Britain, including a ban on feeding rendered slaughterhouse
>   waste as animal feed, mad cow disease would eventually emerge in
>   the US. The US failed to act and late Tuesday the Secretary of
>   Agriculture Ann Veneman announced that the first US case of mad cow
>   disease has appeared in a "downer cow" in the state of Washington.
>   Within minutes of USDA's news conference John Stauber was
>   interviewed live on CNN and interviewed in <A HREF="The New York
>   Times and other media refuting the reassuring spin of the USDA.
>   Center for Consumer Freedom, a tobacco, booze and food industry
>   front group, wasted no time attacking Stauber on behalf of its
>   corporate funders such as Excel/Cargill, National Steak & Poultry,
>   Outback Steak House, Tyson Foods, Wendy's, Whitecastle and others.
>   The first case of mad cow disease in North America was found in
>   Canada in May, 2003. You can read an interview Stauber gave this
>   August warning that the disease was likely also in the US. In
>   related news, Nature reports what might be the first case of human
>   mad cow disease spread by blood transfusion. In laboratory
>   experiments blood plasma can spread mad cow-typed diseases, but the
>   US government allows calves to be fed milk formula containing
>   cattle blood plasma as a source of protein.
>SOURCE: Various, December 24, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1072242000
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1072242000
>
>2. HUMANS EATING DOWNER COWS
>http://www.kirotv.com/station/2249324/detail.html
>   After Seattle, Washington TV station KIRO-TV aired an investigation
>   last year into the cattle industry's continuing sale of downer cows
>   for human consumption, the station came under attack from the
>   industry as well as state and national government regulators.
>   According to KIRO reporter Chris Halsne, "The USDA public relations
>   folks in Washington DC are spinning 'pure' fantasy to imply KIRO-TV
>   played 'gotcha journalism.' Perhaps, the USDA didn't want proof
>   that their meat inspectors failed repeatedly to perform a proper
>   inspection of downer cows outside a slaughterhouse in Chehalis. ...
>   Big-money beef and dairy promoters are out to protect themselves,
>   their industry, their profits and their political interests by
>   silencing future journalists who dare question them." KIRO's
>   investigative team found that "meat from dying, sick or diseased
>   cows" is "getting into your food." After the report aired, a "host
>   of state agencies" spent "tax money in a campaign to discredit our
>   findings." KIRO stands by its story, even though "The Washington
>   Beef and Dairy Commissions have been conducting a public relations
>   campaign, criticizing KIRO-TV for broadcasting the stories of
>   downer cows you just saw. You may not know, but you're paying for
>   this government agency to attack our investigation."
>SOURCE: KIRO-TV, Seattle, Washington
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1072239778
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1072239778
>
>3. TRIED BY THE MEDIA
>http://www.cmonitor.com/stories/news/opinion/other2003/jackson122303_2003.shtml
>   We've done our best to ignore the media's latest feeding frenzy
>   over singer Michael Jackson -- until now, that is. The filing of
>   nine felony counts against Jackson "was orchestrated by a Hollywood
>   public relations company, Tellem Worldwide," reports Tim Rutten.
>   Tellem "is providing pro bono services to the Santa Barbara
>   prosecutors. As special correspondent Linda Deutsch and reporter
>   Tim Molloy of Associated Press reported last week, the company's
>   other clients include the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. The
>   company will be handling all media inquiries during the case."
>   According to District Attorney Thomas Sneddon Jr., the unusually
>   long interval between Jackson's arrest and the formal filing of
>   charges was necessary, "so that the county could set up a Web site
>   to release information to hundreds of news organizations following
>   the case."
>SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor, December 23, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1072155601
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1072155601
>
>4. THE KILLING IN SHILLING
>http://nydailynews.com/front/story/147144p-129729c.html
>   "Every holiday season, the Toy Guy, aka Christopher Byrne, appears
>   on scores of local and national television and radio shows with his
>   selections of the best and hottest toys," reports William Sherman.
>   ""But what the parents and children don't know, and are not told by
>   anchors and reporters, is that Byrne is paid hundreds of thousands
>   of dollars annually by those toy manufacturers to hawk their
>   products." Byrne is an employee of Litsky Public Relations, which
>   charges $10,000 per product mention.
>SOURCE: New York Daily News
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1072151985
>
>5. BLACK'S HACKS
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/business/media/22CONR.html
>   Conservative columnist George Will doesn't think it's anybody's
>   business that he's been paid $25,000 a year by scandal-plagued
>   media magnate Conrad Black. Will is one of several mostly
>   conservative pundits and politicians who got paid to sit on the
>   advisory board of Black's company, Hollinger International. Others
>   included William F. Buckley, Jr., Margaret Thatcher, ValEry Giscard
>   d'Estaing, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard N. Perle and Dwayne O.
>   Andreas. Buckley, who has pocketed an estimated $200,000 from Black
>   over the years, recently defended him publicly while claiming that
>   Black "has never donated a nickel to any of my enterprises."
>SOURCE: New York Times, December 22, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1072069201
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1072069201
>
>6. KEEPING SECRETS
>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031222/usnews/22secrecy.htm
>   "For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but
>   efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical
>   operations of the federal government - cloaking its own affairs
>   from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important
>   information on health, safety, and environmental matters," report
>   Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound. "The result has been a
>   reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government while
>   making increasing amounts of information unavailable to the
>   taxpayers who pay for its collection and analysis." Schmitt and
>   Pound have compiled a detailed report on the extent of the new
>   secrecy and the impact it is having on Americans' right to know.
>   Health and environmental activists are raising public awareness
>   about the dangers of secrecy surrounding chemical sites with a new
>   TV advertisement that concludes, "President Bush, don't let a
>   Chemical 911 happen on your watch."
>SOURCE: US News and World Report, December 22, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1072069200
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1072069200
>
>7. THE GOVERNATOR'S JUDGMENT DAY
>http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/millercomp1.html
>   A Los Angeles woman who came forward during the California
>   gubernatorial campaign to accuse Arnold Schwarzenegger of previous
>   instances of sexual harassment has sued the former star of "True
>   Lies" and "Conan the Barbarian," claiming that he and his campaign
>   smeared her as a convicted felon when she made her charges. Former
>   stuntwoman Rhonda Miller charges that the Schwarzenegger camp told
>   reporters she had an extensive rap sheet for theft, forgery, drugs
>   and prostitution, a dirty trick meant to discount her credibility
>   when it came to the harassment charges. Miller claims that the
>   Schwarzenegger smear began an hour after she made her charges
>   public, with campaign spokesman Sean Walsh sending journalists an
>   e-mail directing them to the Superior Court's web site, where they
>   could access Miller's lengthy criminal history. The felon in
>   question, however, was a different Rhonda Miller.
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1071946076
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1071946076
>
>8. THANK YOU, MOLLY IVINS !
>https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118&referer=http%3A%2F%2
>   Consider this holiday gift suggestion from Bushwacked author Molly
>   Ivins. She writes in her current column, "We can knock off our
>   entire Christmas or Hanukkah gift lists without ever going near a
>   mall. The perfect answer is to give money to a worthy cause in the
>   name of your friends and loved ones. ... Two outfits I especially
>   like that watch the media are the Center for Media and Democracy,
>   which specializes in analyzing public relations and propaganda
>   campaigns, and FAIR, the overworked folks trying to keep up with
>   right-wing lies in the corporate media. The Center can be reached
>   through prwatch.org [or 520 University Ave. #227, Madison, WI
>   53703] and FAIR is FAIR.org (or 112 W. 27th St., New York, NY
>   10001.) This should be our shining hour." Thanks so much Molly, and
>   we sure hope folks will follow your wonderful suggestion!
>SOURCE: Molly Ivins, December 19, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1071810000
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1071810000
>
>9. GM WATCH EXPOSES 'THE BIOTECH BRIGADE'
>http://www.gmwatch.org
>   A new global directory on the massive and deceptive PR push behind
>   genetically engineered food is now available free online from the
>   British organization GM Watch. The directory examines many of the
>   key PR operators, front groups, corporate-friendly scientists,
>   lobbyists, media scams and and political networks that are active
>   in this field. The directory provides extensive information on
>   professional media manipulators, many of whom are active over a
>   wide range of environmental, agricultural and trade issues. Writer
>   George Monbiot recently drew on the new directory for an article
>   exposing how a far right network had infiltrated a whole series of
>   science-media related groups.
>SOURCE: GM Watch
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1071803438
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1071803438
>
>10. MADD'S DASH OF BRANDY
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9677-2003Dec17.html
>   Brandy Anderson, a former director of public policy for Mothers
>   Against Drunk Driving (MADD), has gone to work for the Century
>   Council, a nonprofit organization founded and funded by major
>   liquor distillers including Allied Domecq Spirits, Bacardi and
>   Pernod Ricard. Anderson has also worked as a senior manager at the
>   Washington, D.C., PR firm Blakey & Agnew.
>SOURCE: Washington Post, December 18, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1071723603
>
>11. "FEARLESS PURSUIT OF TRUTH"? HAH!
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9926-2003Dec17.html
>   A new annual journalism award has been created in honor of Michael
>   Kelly, who edited publications including The New Republic, National
>   Journal, Atlantic Monthly before he was killed while covering the
>   war in Iraq. The Michael Kelly Award will recognize a journalist
>   "whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly's own
>   career: the fearless expression and pursuit of truth." It's rather
>   ironic, since Kelly is the guy who nurtured the embarrassing career
>   of Stephen Glass, one of the most notorious journalistic frauds of
>   the past century. The Daily Howler has taken a genuinely fearless
>   look at Kelly's career, calling him "a relentless dissembler and
>   the equivalent of a loud, angry drunk. He did deep damage to his
>   country's discourse - and as such, he harmed the public interest."
>SOURCE: Washington Post, December 18, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1071723602
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1071723602
>
>12. WHITE HOUSE WEB SCRUBBING
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9821-2003Dec17.html
>   "It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush
>   administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own
>   cosmetic touch-ups to history," writes Dana Milbank. "White House
>   officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of
>   the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this
>   year that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay more than $1.7
>   billion to reconstruct Iraq -- which turned out to be a gross
>   understatement of the tens of billions of dollars the government
>   now expects to spend. Recently, however, the government has purged
>   the offending comments by Natsios from the agency's Web site."
>   Moreover, Milbank adds, "This is not the first time the
>   administration has done some creative editing of government Web
>   sites."
>SOURCE: Washington Post, December 18, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/December_2003.html#1071723601
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1071723601
>
>13. NO WMDS?  NO BIG DEAL, SAYS BUSH
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1110221,00.html
>   "The man leading the US hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
>   [David Kay] will leave his post prematurely in the next few months
>   amid dwindling expectations that there is anything to be found. ...
>   'This is a big blow to the administration and it will signal the
>   effective end of the search for weapons of mass destruction,' said
>   Joseph Cirincione, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment
>   Institute for Peace in Washington. 'Some will continue looking but
>   very, very few expect there to be any significant finds at this
>   point.' ... But the White House has not mentioned weapons of mass
>   destruction as a justification for the war in recent months,
>   stressing the removal of Saddam instead. In a television interview
>   this week, President George Bush appeared to deny there was a
>   distinction between his pre-war claims that Saddam had an arsenal
>   of non-conventional weapons, and his administration's current
>   argument that the regime was planning to restart its weapons
>   programmes. When an interviewer for ABC television, Diane Sawyer,
>   reminded him of claims of the "hard fact that there were weapons of
>   mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move
>   to acquire those weapons", Mr Bush asked: "What's the difference?"
>SOURCE: The Guardian, December 18, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1071723600
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>The Weekly Spin is compiled by staff and volunteers at PR Watch.
>To subscribe or unsubcribe, visit:
>http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
>
>Daily updates and news from past weeks can be found at the
>Spin of the Day" section of the PR Watch website:
>http://www.prwatch.org/spin/index.html
>
>Archives of our quarterly publication, PR Watch, are at:
>http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues
>
>PR Watch, Spin of the Day and the Weekly Spin are projects
>of the Center for Media & Democracy, a nonprofit organization
>that offers investigative reporting on the public relations
>industry. We help the public recognize manipulative and
>misleading PR practices by exposing the activities of
>secretive, little-known propaganda-for-hire firms that
>work to control political debates and public opinion.
>Please send any questions or suggestions about our
>publications to:
>(editor /at/ prwatch.org)
>
>Contributions to the Center for Media & Democracy
>are tax-deductible. Send checks to:
>    CMD
>    520 University Ave. #310
>    Madison, WI 53703
>
>To donate now online, visit:
>https://www.egrants.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2344-0|1118-0
>_______________________________________________
>Weekly-Spin mailing list
>(Weekly-Spin /at/ prwatch.org)
>http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/weekly-spin

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Carpentier Nico (Phd)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Katholieke Universiteit Brussel - Catholic University of Brussels
Vrijheidslaan 17 - B-1081 Brussel - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-412.42.78
F: ++ 32 (0)2/412.42.00
Office: 4/0/18
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Media Sociology (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.30
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.28.61
Office: C0.05
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ kubrussel.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------  


----------------
ECCR-Mailing list
---
To unsubscribe, send an email message to (majordomo /at/ listserv.vub.ac.be)
with in the body of the message (NOT in the subject): unsubscribe eccr
---
ECCR - European Consortium for Communications Research
Secretariat: P.O. Box 106, B-1210 Brussels 21, Belgium
Tel.: +32-2-412 42 78/47
Fax.: +32-2-412 42 00
Email: (freenet002 /at/ pi.be) or (Rico.Lie /at/ pi.be)
URL: http://www.eccr.info
----------------


[Previous message][Next message][Back to index]