(From 2002 until 2005, this mailing list was called the ECCR mailing list)
[Previous message][Next message][Back to index]
[eccr] Fwd: The Weekly Spin, Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Wed Jun 18 08:56:40 GMT 2003
>THE WEEKLY SPIN, Wednesday, June 18, 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. Stonewalling the Arms Inspectors
>2. Facts about Iraq? Who cares?
>3. 'Shared Values' Campaign Under Review
>4. Intelligence? What Intelligence?
>5. Pentagon's PR Chief Torie Clarke Resigns
>6. CBS News/Viacom Offers POW Lynch Stardom
>7. Those Ungrateful Iraqis
>8. Not Counting the Dead
>9. Media's Class Divisions
>10. Right Wing Think Tank Takes Aim at NGOs
>11. The Strategically Ambiguous Bush
>12. Obfuscation, Obfuscation, Obfuscation
>13. PRSA Hands Out Silver Anvils
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>1. STONEWALLING THE ARMS INSPECTORS
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2996752.stm
> Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services
> Committee, has publicly challenged the CIA's handling of
> information about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "Why
> did the CIA say that they had provided detailed information to the
> UN inspectors on all of the high and medium suspect sites with the
> UN, when they had not?" Levin asked. "Did the CIA act in this way
> in order not to undermine administration policy? Was there another
> explanation for this? ... It undermines the credibility of the
> director of intelligence to be making public statements relative to
> intelligence which are not factually accurate." Levin wants a
> Senate investigation into whether US intelligence on Iraq was
> "shaded or exaggerated."
>SOURCE: BBC, June 17, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055822401
>
>2. FACTS ABOUT IRAQ? WHO CARES?
>http://www.dmregister.com/opinion/stories/c2125555/21521542.html
> The Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius once wrote, "The opinion of
> 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the
> subject." The editorial board of the Des Moines Register writes,
> "That is the quote that comes to mind now that a new poll reveals
> many Americans are misinformed about Iraq." The fact that Americans
> don't know the truth about the basics is "downright scary. It means
> Americans are basing their opinions about the Iraq war on
> misinformation." According to the Register, the findings also
> suggest a reason why "the Bush administration may not be so
> concerned about finding the still-elusive weapons of mass
> destruction in Iraq: It doesn't matter. The people think they were
> found. The people think Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the
> Sept. 11 hijackings. The people think it's OK to attack a country.
> Because they don't know the facts."
>SOURCE: Des Moines Register, June 17, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
> http://www.prwatch.org/spin/June_2003.html#1055822400
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055822400
>
>3. 'SHARED VALUES' CAMPAIGN UNDER REVIEW
>http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=182697&site=3
> "At the request of Congress, the State Department is launching an
> inquiry into its campaign to polish America's image in Muslim
> countries over the past two years," PR Week writes. "The move comes
> just one week after a new Pew Global Attitudes survey showed that
> negative views of the US are on the rise in the Middle East." Most
> of the work to be reviewed -- known as the "Shared Values" campaign
> -- "was spearheaded by former ad executive Charlotte Beers, who
> left her post as undersecretary of state for public affairs and
> public diplomacy in March for health reasons." Veteran Middle East
> diplomat Edward Djerejian will assemble and lead an advisory group
> that "will consist largely of private-sector PR and media experts,"
> PR Week writes.
>SOURCE: PR Week, June 16, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055736003
>
>4. INTELLIGENCE? WHAT INTELLIGENCE?
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62941-2003Jun15?language=printer
> Five days before the war began in Iraq, Rand Beers resigned his
> White House job as special assistant to the president for combating
> terrorism. "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its
> words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not
> more secure," Beers told reporter Laura Blumenfeld. "As an insider,
> I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and
> watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked
> out." Beers described the Bush administration as "a very closed,
> small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines
> what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There's almost a
> religious kind of certainty. There's no curiosity about opposing
> points of view. It's very scary. There's kind of a ghost agenda."
>SOURCE: Washington Post, June 16, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
> http://www.prwatch.org/spin/June_2003.html#1055736002
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055736002
>
>5. PENTAGON'S PR CHIEF TORIE CLARKE RESIGNS
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64452-2003Jun16.html?nav=hptoc_p
> Victoria "Torie" Clarke is resigning from her position as
> Department of Defense assistant secretary for public affairs.
> Clarke says she's leaving her top spot as Pentagon spin doctor for
> personal reasons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a press
> release that in her two years of service, Clarke has "developed
> countless new methods to tell the story of our fighting forces, and
> bring their courage, dedication, and professionalism into sharp
> focus for all Americans." As we report in our forthcoming book
> Weapons of Mass Deception, Clarke is credited with developing the
> Pentagon's brilliant PR strategy of embedding reporters with troops
> in Iraq. If investigations are ever held on the selling of the war
> a key question might become 'what did Torie know, and when did she
> know it?'
>SOURCE: Washington Post, June 16, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
> http://www.prwatch.org/spin/June_2003.html#1055736001
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055736001
>
>6. CBS NEWS/VIACOM OFFERS POW LYNCH STARDOM
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/16/business/media/16CBS.html?ex=1056774440&ei=1&en=4e35cd4a9dc97699
> "In its letters to Private Lynch's family and officials at the
> medical center, obtained by The New York Times, CBS News combined
> its pitch for a two-hour documentary with many other projects
> envisioned by the other divisions of its corporate parent, Viacom.
> In the process, CBS renewed concerns among critics about the
> independence of news divisions owned by media giants. 'Attached you
> will find the outlines of a proposal that includes ideas from CBS
> News, CBS Entertainment, MTV networks and Simon & Schuster
> publishers,' Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice president, wrote to
> Private Lynch's military representatives. 'From the distinguished
> reporting of CBS News to the youthful reach of MTV, we believe this
> is a unique combination of projects that will do justice to
> Jessica's inspiring story.' "
>SOURCE: New York Times, June 16, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055736000
>
>7. THOSE UNGRATEFUL IRAQIS
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/business/yourmoney/15VIEW.html?pagewanted=print
> Morale among U.S. troops in Iraq is suffering as they find
> themselves "locked into an increasingly serious battle against
> guerrilla snipers and bombers who stage regular hit-and-run
> attacks," reports Edmund L. Andrews. "You call Donald Rumsfeld and
> tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home," said infantryman
> Pfc. Matthew C. O'Dell. "Tell him to come spend a night in our
> building." Several soldiers have received psychological counseling
> after showing signs of combat stress: nightmares, sleeplessness,
> edginess, outbursts of anger and what a chaplain called "intrusive
> thoughts." But apparently the thought that we shouldn't be
> occupying Iraq hasn't yet intruded on people like Arizona resident
> Carol Drew, who thinks the Iraqis are "selfish and thankless" for
> "crying and whining about how little food and water there is and
> blaming it on America." Drew's niece is stationed in Iraq as a
> soldier. "The soldiers are suffering diarrhea," she reports. "They
> sleep on the ground in ditches to cover themselves from constant
> gunfire from the Iraqis. ... She has lost 15 pounds and is weak
> from lack of proper nutrition and water, but is adamant about being
> there to do the job that her government has required her to do."
> (How much "constant gunfire" will it take to persuade her that the
> Iraqis don't want them there?)
>SOURCE: New York Times, June 15, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
> http://www.prwatch.org/spin/June_2003.html#1055649600
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055649600
>
>8. NOT COUNTING THE DEAD
>http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/164/oped/US_clouds_Iraqi_civilian_deathsP.shtml
> Derrick Z. Jackson examines the "numbing prattle" from US military
> officials "about the precision of our weaponry, precaution to avoid
> needless carnage, and promises to investigate possible mistakes."
> During the war, officials said pledged investigations into civilian
> casualties, but are now admitting that the "investigations" were
> never conducted. A recent Associated Press report counted more than
> 3,000 civilian deaths. The Iraq body count has tallied more than
> 5,000. Another group, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in
> Conflict, is conducting its own count and campaigning for U.S.
> compensation to family members of the dead.
>SOURCE: Boston Globe, June 13, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
> http://www.prwatch.org/spin/June_2003.html#1055476800
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055476800
>
>9. MEDIA'S CLASS DIVISIONS
>http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/stories/s876082.htm
> Discussing whether the profit making side of the media industry had
> won out over content, former "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman
> (who was played by Al Pacino in the movie "The Insider") told
> Australia's Radio National, "It's a situation where the class
> differential between the people who present, so-called presenters,
> we call them talent when you work inside the network news
> organisations, between what they make for instance annually, and
> what the people who work in the industry make, who actually do most
> of the reporting and production and writing, is just phenomenal.
> They become part of if you will, the logo of the corporate
> organisation. An example would be Frontline, the only documentary
> series on US network television, it's on public television, has an
> annual budget that is less than the annual salary of the host of
> the Today Show ... Katie Couric."
>SOURCE: Media Report (Australia), June 12, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055390402
>
>10. RIGHT WING THINK TANK TAKES AIM AT NGOS
>http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0612-09.htm
> The industry-funded right-wing think tank the American Enterprise
> Institute (AEI) has taken aim at non-governmental organizations.
> During a recent all-day conference, "Nongovernmental Organizations:
> The Growing Power of an Unelected Few," speakers delivered the
> message that NGOs "are using their growing prominence and power to
> pursue a 'liberal' agenda at the international level that threatens
> U.S. sovereignty and free-market capitalism." According to AEI and
> the conference co-sponsor, the rightist Institute of Public Affairs
> of Australia, "NGOs have created their own rules and regulations
> and demanded that governments and corporations abide by those
> rules." Jim Lobe writes for OneWorld, "Several speakers praised the
> work of NGOs ... but stressed that, at the international policy
> level, much of what they did actually hurt the intended
> beneficiaries." NGOs' opposition to the use of DDT to fight malaria
> and to the delivery of genetically-engineered corn in southern
> Africa were cited as examples of policies which amounted to
> "eco-imperialism" and showed a "callous disregard for human life."
>SOURCE: OneWorld, June 12, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
> http://www.prwatch.org/spin/June_2003.html#1055390401
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055390401
>
>11. THE STRATEGICALLY AMBIGUOUS BUSH
>http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20030612.html
> "President Bush's recent claim that weapons of mass destruction
> have been found in Iraq highlights two disturbing trends in
> rhetoric from the White House," observes Bryan Keefer. The first
> "is the Bush administration's record of factual misstatements and
> distortions. The second is the administration's - and especially
> President Bush's - history of strategically ambiguous statements
> that, while technically or arguably true, imply connections between
> two things which he cannot directly demonstrate." Keefer explains
> how Bush has used language to fudge the difference between
> "weapons" and "weapons programs," to insinuate a relationship
> between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and to mislead the public
> about the causes of the U.S. budget deficit and the economic
> recession.
>SOURCE: Spinsanity.org, June 12, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055390400
>
>12. OBFUSCATION, OBFUSCATION, OBFUSCATION
>http://media.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,7550,975178,00.html
> Most public relations practioners will tell you that PR is about
> good communication between an organization and its public. But the
> Guardian's Mark Borkowski finds a different kind of public
> relations being practiced by political and corporate institutions.
> To deal with objections to their actions, these institutions
> "create smokescreens of confusion and perplexity to enable them to
> do exactly what they want, regardless of the wishes of the people
> they are supposed to serve," Borkowski writes. "To take matters in
> order of importance: obfuscation, obfuscation, obfuscation is New
> Labour's great unsung policy, and the one employed to argue away
> the government's failure to fulfil its unambiguous electoral
> promises."
>SOURCE: Guardian (UK), June 11, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1055304000
>
>13. PRSA HANDS OUT SILVER ANVILS
>http://www.prsa.org/_News/press/pr060603.asp
> The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) announced the
> winners of its top award, the Silver Anvil. The Best of Silver
> Anvil award went to co-winners the U.S. Postal Service and the
> Presidents Council of State Universities of Michigan. U.S. Postal
> Service with Burson-Marsteller won for their campaign to restore
> public trust and confidence in the U.S. Postal Service during and
> after the fall 2001 anthrax crisis. The Presidents Council of State
> Universities of Michigan with Marketing Resource Group, Inc. won
> for a successful campaign that helped defeat a statewide ballot
> measure, which would have diverted some of Michigan's $300 million
> tobacco settlement away from college scholarships.
>SOURCE: Public Relations Society of America, June 6, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
> http://www.prwatch.org/spin/June_2003.html#1054872001
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
> http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1054872001
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University Brussels
Studies on Media, Information & Telecommunication (SMIT)
Centre for Media Sociology (CeMeSO)
Office: C0.05
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.30
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.28.61
E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
W1: http://smit.vub.ac.be/
W2: 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]
