[eccr] Fwd: The Weekly Spin, Wednesday, October 8, 2003

>THE WEEKLY SPIN, Wednesday, October 8, 2003
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>The Weekly Spin features selected news summaries with links to
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>THIS WEEK'S NEWS
>
>1. Arnold's PR Muscle
>2. Komen Foundation Carefully Manages Brand
>3. It's The Foreign Policy, Stupid
>4. The Spin War Trumps the War on Terror
>5. The Nixon Effect
>6. Saying Bye-Bye to "Hi"
>7. Blair 'Knew Iraq WMD Claim Wrong'
>8. Miller Time Out
>9. Disinformed by TV
>10. Pentagon Honors Four Dead Journalists, Ignores Others
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>1. ARNOLD'S PR MUSCLE
>http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/6937979.htm
>   "Throughout his career as a bodybuilder and action-movie star,
>   Arnold Schwarzenegger has shaped his public persona much as he once
>   sought to sculpt his champion muscles - with a domineering
>   determination," write Dion Nissenbaum and Eric Nalder. His
>   obsession with controlling his image goes even beyond the practices
>   of other Hollywood celebrities. "Arnold's entire career has been
>   manufactured," said Arthur Seidelman, who directed Schwarzenegger
>   in his first action film. "He is very much in control of his image
>   and has shaped that image every step of the way. He's a very
>   controlling, powerful force." During his campaign for public
>   office, his aides have been required to sign a five-page
>   confidentiality agreement and have run his electoral race like a
>   Hollywood publicity campaign, courting sycophantic interviews while
>   avoiding tough questions from journalists - even as questions mount
>   about the 15 women who have accused him of sexually harassing
>   behavior, former associates have said he admired Hitler's skills as
>   a propagandist, and journalist Greg Palast reports on a sweetheart
>   deal between the Governator and California's scandal-ridden utility
>   companies.
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/October_2003.html#1065415364
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065415364
>
>2. KOMEN FOUNDATION CAREFULLY MANAGES BRAND
>http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=192046&site=3
>   "The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation started with a small
>   promise, but became a giant in the battle against breast cancer
>   with a corporate approach to PR," PR Week reports. Part of that
>   approach is consistency of message. "Making sure the logo and brand
>   message are used properly by volunteer affiliates and corporate
>   partners can be a challenge," PR Week writes. "The foundation
>   currently is working on a perception benchmarking project to gauge
>   consumer awareness and the brand's strengths and weaknesses, [the
>   foundation's communications director Susan] Carter says. 'Branding
>   manager' may be a relatively new job title at the foundation, but
>   Komen takes great pains to protect its brand, says Joy Rich,
>   philanthropy specialist at Pier 1 Imports. The retailer selected
>   Komen as its national CSR partner, and sells pink candles each
>   fall. Pier 1 receives branding packets from the foundation,
>   complete with logos and press-release boilerplates, Rich says.
>   'They just give us the tools that we need to make sure we're
>   getting the message out correctly,' she notes."
>SOURCE: PR Week, October 6, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065412803
>
>3. IT'S THE FOREIGN POLICY, STUPID
>http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=191933&site=3
>   "A severe lack of funding, convoluted bureaucracy, and a near-total
>   absence of research and measurability are badly undermining US
>   attempts to bolster its image via public diplomacy in Muslim
>   countries, according to a report released last week by the Advisory
>   Group on Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World," PR Week's
>   Douglas Quenqua writes. The report, "Changing Minds, Winning
>   Peace," recommendations include creating a cabinet-level foreign
>   policy PR advisor to the President and an independent Corporation
>   for Public Diplomacy to increase private-sector involvement. While
>   touring Arab countries, advisory panel members were repeatedly told
>   that "we like Americans but not what the American government is
>   doing." Nancy Snow, assistant professor of communications at
>   California State University - Fullerton, writes for O'Dwyer's PR,
>   "This distinction between people and policy was deemed
>   'unrealistic, since Americans elect their government and broadly
>   support its foreign policy.' Wasn't it President Bush who made just
>   that distinction when he said in his 48-hour ultimatum speech that
>   military action was solely directed at Saddam Hussein's regime, not
>   the Iraqi people?"
>SOURCE: PR Week, October 6, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/October_2003.html#1065412802
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065412802
>
>4. THE SPIN WAR TRUMPS THE WAR ON TERROR
>http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_3201.shtml
>   The White House official who leaked the identity of CIA operative
>   Valerie Plame did more than attack a political enemy, writes Shaun
>   Waterman. Plame worked for the CIA "on the very issue the Bush
>   administration says was at the heart of its decision to go to war
>   with Iraq: weapons of mass destruction. ... Plame's outing,
>   whomever did it, has damaged the very effort the White House said
>   it was pursuing in going to war in the first place. A very
>   important line has been crossed here. The integrity of the policy
>   goals - non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - is now
>   seen by at least some in the White House as less important than the
>   integrity of the message - we didn't exaggerate the case against
>   Iraq. ... The message seems to have trumped everything, even the
>   need to get it right in the war on terror."
>SOURCE: Capitol Hill Blue, October 6, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065412801
>
>5. THE NIXON EFFECT
>http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-greenberg6oct06,1,869369.story?coll=la-headlines-oped-manual
>   A specter is haunting American politics: the specter of Richard
>   Nixon, whose career as a politician created the image-drenched,
>   spin-ridden political culture that now dominates elections and
>   daily governance. David Greenberg, the author a new book about
>   Nixon, notes that he came from California, "where Hollywood's
>   influence and the rise of professional consultants first made
>   'image' central to campaigns." Embracing the new techniques of TV
>   and public relations, Nixon "recruited aides from public relations
>   (William Safire), advertising (H.R. Haldeman) and television (Roger
>   Ailes). In 1968, he won the presidency as a 'New Nixon,' through a
>   strategy designed to control his image. When journalist Joe
>   McGinniss detailed this strategy the next year in The Selling of
>   the President, shamefaced reporters vowed to get wise to such
>   manipulation. ... Since Nixon, we have grown wise to the sleights
>   of modern politics - and politicians have reacted by devising
>   craftier methods."
>SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065412800
>
>6. SAYING BYE-BYE TO "HI"
>http://merip.org/mero/interventions/colla_interv.html
>   The U.S. State Department has launched Hi, a glossy,
>   Arabic-language magazine intended to "build bridges of
>   communication" between Arabs and the United States. Described by
>   its editors as a non-political, lifestyle magazine, "Hi" features
>   happy talk about topics such as sand-surfing, Internet dating, rock
>   climbing and yoga. Elliott Cola and Chris Toensing point out,
>   however, that "Hi's process of presenting its content as
>   non-political involves a significant amount of repression and
>   revision." For example, its stories on collaborations between
>   Western and Middle Eastern musicians have omitted mention of the
>   political messages included in many of those musicians' song
>   lyrics. Likewise, its version of a poem by Palestinian-American
>   Suheir Hammad actually rewrote Hammad's poem, deleting more than
>   half of it to eliminate its forthright anti-racist, feminist
>   politics.
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/October_2003.html#1065384717
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065384717
>
>7. BLAIR 'KNEW IRAQ WMD CLAIM WRONG'
>http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/10/05/blair.cook/
>   "British Prime Minister Tony Blair privately admitted before the
>   Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction
>   that could be used within 45 minutes, former Foreign Secretary
>   Robin Cook has claimed," CNN International reports. Cook resigned
>   his government post in protest of British involvement in Iraq. The
>   Sunday Times of London published excerpts of Cook's new book,
>   "Point of Departure," based on his diaries kept during the run-up
>   to war. Cook wrote in February that Blair "deliberately crafted a
>   suggestive phrasing which in the minds of many views must have
>   created an impression, and was designed to create the impression,
>   that British troops were going to Iraq to fight a threat from al
>   Qaeda."
>SOURCE: CNN International, October 5, 2003
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065326400
>
>8. MILLER TIME OUT
>http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1991338
>   "On Sept. 29, a remarkable story appeared on the front page of The
>   New York Times," William E. Jackson, Jr. writes in Editor &
>   Publisher. Far down in the story there is a mea culpa for reporting
>   by the Times' Judith Miller on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass
>   destruction. Miller's stories relied heavily on information and
>   defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmad Chalabi.
>   "Miller is not a neutral, nor an objective journalist," Jackson
>   writes. "This can be acceptable, if you're a great reporter, "but
>   she ain't, and that's why she's a propagandist,'" a former Times
>   employee told Jackson. "One major rule that she consistently
>   violates, when she is not sharing a byline, is that of 'protecting
>   the paper's neutrality.' The editors know, of course, that she is
>   an ideological neo-conservative, close to the Bush administration
>   neo-cons, and thoroughly identified with them. She had called for
>   the overthrow of Saddam's regime in non-Times publications and had
>   also spoken out before the war in public speeches for which she was
>   paid," Jackson writes.
>SOURCE: Editor & Publisher, October 2, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/October_2003.html#1065067201
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065067201
>
>9. DISINFORMED BY TV
>http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/6918226.htm
>   A new study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes shows
>   that a majority of Americans have held at least one of three
>   mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq and those
>   misperceptions contributed to much of the popular support for the
>   war. The three common mistaken impressions are that: (1) U.S.
>   forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; (2) there's clear
>   evidence that Saddam Hussein worked closely with the 9/11
>   terrorists; and (3) people in foreign countries generally either
>   backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and
>   opposing it. The analysis released Thursday also correlated the
>   misperceptions with the primary news source of the mistaken
>   respondents and found that people who relied on television were
>   more likely than other respondents to believe at least one of the
>   three misperceptions - especially if their main news source was
>   Fox.
>SOURCE: Knight Ridder, October 2, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/October_2003.html#1065067200
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1065067200
>
>10. PENTAGON HONORS FOUR DEAD JOURNALISTS, IGNORES OTHERS
>http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=3542223
>   "Bush administration officials and U.S. news media chiefs met on a
>   rain-swept Civil War battlefield on Wednesday to honor four
>   American journalists who died in Iraq and Pakistan while reporting
>   on the U.S. war on terrorism. ... Honored were Daniel Pearl ... and
>   three journalists who traveled with U.S. fighting units in Iraq
>   this year -- Michael Kelly of the Atlantic Monthly and Washington
>   Post, David Bloom of NBC and Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe.
>   ... Not mentioned were the five journalists killed by U.S. forces
>   in Iraq, or the Pentagon's unwillingness to release details about
>   its shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad that killed two
>   reporters and the Aug. 17 death of a Reuters TV cameraman, Mazen
>   Dana. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul) Wolfowitz declined to
>   comment. 'I suspect what's happening here is that the Pentagon
>   wants very much to continue its successful cultivation of U.S.
>   journalists that began with the embeds,' John Stauber, co-author of
>   the book Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in
>   Bush's War on Iraq, told Reuters in a telephone interview. ... Last
>   month, top U.S. Army officers admitted using news coverage by
>   embeds to achieve military goals in Iraq. A day before the April 8
>   shelling of the Palestine Hotel, tanks from the same unit carried
>   embedded reporters on a "thunder run" through Baghdad to show the
>   world that the city was under U.S. control."
>SOURCE: Reuters, October 1, 2003
>More web links related to this story are available at:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/spin/October_2003.html#1064980801
>To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
>    http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1064980801
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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