In the news
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- Just Say "No" to Sex and the Public Option?: Heads are spinning after the discredited Senate Finance Committee blocked the public option from being part of the health care bill proposed by Senator Max Baucus of Montana and then voted for spending $50 million on the (also discredited) abstinence-only education program that President Obama had pressed to eliminate from the federal budget.
- Making War Spin McChrystal Clear: General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. military and NATO commander in Afghanistan, wants to change strategic communications goals there from a "struggle for the 'hearts and minds' of the Afghan population to one of giving them 'trust and confidence'" in their government and their future. He also wants to focus on exposing insurgents' "flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran," which is already a talking point for U.S. military-funded public relations contracts in Afghanistan.
- New Oil and Coal Fronts Greenwash Global Warming: Television ads from a new Montana-based group called CO2 Is Green claim: "There is no scientific evidence that CO2 [carbon dioxide] is a pollutant. In fact higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth's ecosystems." The ads urge voters to contact their Senators and Representative, "and remind them CO2 is not pollution." The ads are meant to stoke opposition to climate change legislation. Not surprisingly, the man behind the ads, the lobbying group CO2 Is Green and a related "educational" group called Plants Need CO2 is "a veteran oil industry executive." H. Leighton Steward was a director at EOG Resources, which was previously named the Enron Oil and Gas Company, and is an honorary director of the American Petroleum Institute.
- Shareholders Approve Takeover of Medialink Worldwide: Medialink Worldwide -- the largest producer of video news releases and audio news releases -- has announced that shareholders approved a proposal to merge with TNM Group, a subsidiary of The NewsMarket. Of the shareholders who voted at a special general meeting, 91% approved the merger. In May, TNM offered to buy the company's shares for 20 cents, well above where it has traded before the offer. In the proxy statement (pdf) filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Medialink bluntly stated, "We have had a history of operating losses and have not reported operating income since the year ended December 31, 2000." The merger had the full support of Medialink Worldwide's board of directors.
- Who Is Bankrolling the League of American Voters?: "Standing in a medical exam room, a neurosurgeon in a white lab coat stares solemnly into the camera and warns that President Obama’s health care plan 'will hurt our seniors' and 'end Medicare as we know it.' ... How this ad came to be produced and distributed provides a case study in modern American political advocacy. It shows how a quickly assembled group with uncertain origins and funding can make a mark on one of the most contentious public policy debates in memory. The group that says it paid for the campaign -- the League of American Voters -- incorporated less than two weeks before the ad was released online.
- A New Way to Enjoy Nicotine Addiction: Amid an increasingly hostile climate towards secondhand smoke and tobacco advertising, tobacco companies are battling to maintain both their nicotine markets and the ability to use their logos. R.J. Reynolds stopped advertising cigarettes in magazines in 2008, but is once again printing its Camel logo in major magazines like Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and Maxim, in ads for a new form of non-combusted tobacco called "snus" (rhymes with "moose").
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Recent blogs on PR Watch
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- CMD's Wendell Potter was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! about the Senate Finance Committee decision to reject amendments which would provide for a public option in a reformed U.S. health care system. See Amy Goodman Interviews CMD's Wendell Potter, September 30. A few days earlier Potter had pointed to some of the key problems with the health care reform bill proposed by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. See Baucus' Health Care Bill Needs Urgent Care, September 28;
- John Stauber notes that Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, was the only public interest group advocate invited to testify in Washington on Wednesday, September 23, before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in its hearing on the Patriot Act and national security surveillance issues. See CMD's Lisa Graves Testifies Before U.S. Senate on Patriot Act, September 23;
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Editor's pick of the week
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One of the groups spearheading opposition to proposals to reform the U.S. healthcare system is FreedomWorks. In 2009, FreedomWorks has been a prominent opponent of proposals by U.S. President Barack Obama to reform the U.S. healthcare system, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill to address global warming, and state proposals to raise taxes. Who are they?
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Projects for citizen editors
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With the Waxman-Markey climate change bill before the U.S. Senate, coal and energy utility lobbyists are out in force. While the legislation will only have direct effect in the United States, it will indirectly have a major influence on the negotiation of a replacement agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. (The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change hopes to complete a new climate change agreement at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen in December.) Earlier this year, the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative journalism group based in Washington D.C., launched a database on the mostly corporate lobbyists working on climate change issues. If you would like to help bring to the fore the details of the lobbying firms and individual lobbyists helping the top ten U.S. power utilities, here's a citizen journalism project that you can help with. See here for more details. If you have never added material to SourceWatch before, don't worry, as three of our regular editors are at hand to help get you started.
If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here, here, here and here. Hold onto your hat, have fun, and thanks for your help!
And if you would like to work on something else, take a look at some of our earlier citizen journalism projects here.
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Popular articles over the last week
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The most popular pages over the last week have included those on Tom DeLay, the former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, who made an appearance on ABC's Dancing with the Stars program. Other popular page have been the listing of Existing U.S. Coal Plants, Public relations firms, think tanks, greenwashing and Corporate Social Responsibility. The most popular new page has been the Inside Zion Oil article which looks at an oil exploration company that blends religion with its search for oil in Israel.
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What they're saying about SourceWatch
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"The folks at the Center for Media and Democracy have done incredible work documenting fake grassroots ("astroturf") groups. Here, they're helping protects the rights of all Americans to exercise their right to vote. They are completely non-partisan. These guys are the real deal." Craig Newmark, Craig's List
"A truly impressive project based on cutting edge web technology." David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
"The troublemakers at the Center for Media and Democracy, for example, point to dozens of examples of "greenwashing," which they defined as the "unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government or even a non-government organization to sell a product, a policy" or rehabilitate an image. In the center's view, many enterprises labeled green don't deserve the name.—Jack Shafer, "Green Is the New Yellow: On the excesses of 'green' journalism", Slate, July 6, 2007.
"As a journalist frequently on the receiving end of various PR campaigns, some of them based on disinformation, others front groups for undisclosed interests, [CMD's SourceWatch] is an invaluable resource."—Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire
"Thanks for all your help. There's no way I could have done my piece on big PR and global warming without the CMD [Center for Media and Democracy] and your fabulous websites."—Zoe Cormier, journalist, Canada
"The dearth of information on the [U.S.] government [lobbying] disclosure forms about the other business-backed coalitions comes in stark contrast to the data about them culled from media reports, websites, press releases and Internal Revenue Service documents and posted by SourceWatch, a website that tracks advocacy groups." Jeanne Cummings, 'New disclosure reports lack clarity", Politico, April 29, 2008.
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