THE WEEKLY SPIN, February 27, 2008 Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:34:27 -0600 (CST) THE WEEKLY SPIN, FEBRUARY 27, 2008 == BLOG POSTINGS == 1. Jousting with the Lancet: More Data, More Debate over Iraqi Deaths 2. Beyond Advertising: The Pharmaceutical Industry's Hidden Marketing Tactics == BE A CITIZEN JOURNALIST == 1. Featured Participatory Project: References, Please == SPIN OF THE DAY POSTINGS == 1. The Invisible Hands Guiding Doctors' Continuing Education 2. U.S. Air Force Wants More Air Time 3. Having His Cake and Eating It Too 4. The Truth About Lying 5. Great Lakes Study Suppressed 6. Weekly Radio Spin: Coaching Students to Protect Corporations 7. Controversy Grows over Canadian Skeptics Ad Campaign 8. Fake vs. Fakes 9. Telecom War on Net Neutrality 10. A Comical Attempt to Win Young Hearts and Minds 11. Ketchum Caught "Man of the Year" Title for Putin 12. Bank Case Proves Information Wants to Be Free 13. Taking a Stand for Their Communities' Health -------------------------------------------------------------------- == BLOG POSTINGS == 1. JOUSTING WITH THE LANCET: MORE DATA, MORE DEBATE OVER IRAQI DEATHS by Diane Farsetta It's one of the most controversial questions today: How many Iraqis have died since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion? That there is no definitive answer should not come as a surprise, given the chaotic situation in Iraq. Still, it's an important question to ask, for obvious humanitarian, moral and political reasons. Theoretically, the public health surveys and polls that have been conducted in Iraq -- at great risk to the people involved -- should help inform and further the debate. But the data is complicated by different research approaches and their attendant caveats. The matter has been further confused by anemic reporting, with news articles usually framed as a "he said / she said" story, instead of an exploration and interpretation of research findings. These are the conditions under which spin thrives: complex issues, political interests and weak reporting. So it's not too surprising that last month saw a spate of what international health researcher Dr. Richard Garfield calls "Swift Boat editorials." To read the rest of this item, visit: http://www.prwatch.org/node/7034 2. BEYOND ADVERTISING: THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY'S HIDDEN MARKETING TACTICS by Mary Ebeling In early January, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce began investigating celebrity endorsements in television ads for brand-name drugs. The investigation was sparked by Pfizer's commercials for its best-selling cholesterol drug Lipitor. These direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads feature Dr. Robert Jarvik, a pioneer in the development of the artificial heart. Viewers are not told that Jarvik is not a cardiologist, nor is he licensed to practice medicine. His presentation as a trusted expert, Pfizer presumably hopes, is enough to persuade viewers to ask their doctors for Lipitor by name. And that would help erode the increasing competition from generic alternatives. To read the rest of this item, visit: http://www.prwatch.org/node/7026 == BE A CITIZEN JOURNALIST == 1. FEATURED PARTICIPATORY PROJECT: REFERENCES, PLEASE http://www.prwatch.org/node/7045 On SourceWatch, our online wiki about "the names behind the news," we try to encourage a referencing policy which ensures that every piece of information in each article can be verified by a link to an authoritative source for that information. However, sometimes these references get left out. You can help improve SourceWatch goal by identifying articles that need better referencing and tagging them for further work. All it takes is a few minutes. Simply visit a random article (or a specific article of your choosing), read it over, and mark the places whether additional citations are needed by adding {{refimprove}} and {{fact}} tags. Please visit the special SourceWatch page (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:Articles_needing_additional_references) on articles needing additional references for further instructions on how to do this. HAVE FUN, AND THANKS FOR YOUR HELP! SOURCE: SourceWatch == SPIN OF THE DAY POSTINGS == 1. THE INVISIBLE HANDS GUIDING DOCTORS' CONTINUING EDUCATION http://www.prwatch.org/node/7044 Ray Moynihan reveals that while educational events have been advertised to Australian medical practitioners as being independent, behind the scenes sponsoring drug companies were being offered the chance to nominate speakers and topics relating to their drugs. At the center of the controversy is Healthed, which describes itself as "one of Australia's most popular and respected providers of education for health professionals." In 2006 one drug company, CSL, agreed to a "platinum sponsorship" package costing $A18,000 for four seminars to help promote its pain relief drug, Tramal. In an email, CSL wrote to Healthed founder, Dr Ramesh Manocha, asking that he "determine the speaker's opinion re: Tramal as I would like to ensure he positions it appropriately." In response Manocha wrote that he would "reconfirm opinion of headache speaker regarding Tramal to ensure balanced presentation." SOURCE: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, February 24, 2008 2. U.S. AIR FORCE WANTS MORE AIR TIME http://www.prwatch.org/node/7035 The U.S. Air Force "wants to more than double its advertising budget ... to $112.5 million," reports the Air Force Times. Like the Army, which is increasingly targeting adult "influencers" in its attempts to get more young recruits, the Air Force wants to go beyond "the typical advertising to convince young adults to consider joining the service." With an increased ad budget, the Air Force would "explain" its mission "to a wider, and older, general public -- the folks who pay taxes, elect lawmakers and whose children join the service." Over a year, 220 million adults will each "see 30 Air Force advertisements, from ads on Web sites to full-page newspaper ads to prime-time television ads," according to the campaign plan. The campaign will educate "the American public on how today's Air Force is the most engaged, versatile and high-tech of all the military services," states the Air Force's budget proposal. SOURCE: Air Force Times, February 18, 2008 3. HAVING HIS CAKE AND EATING IT TOO http://www.prwatch.org/node/7033 The February 2008 newsletter of the Obesity Society supports a new rule from the New York City's health commisssioner requiring restaurants to publish information about the number of calories in their food, but apparently the society's president, Dr. David B. Allison, hasn't gotten the word. The New York State Restaurant Association, which is suing to block the new rule, hired Allison to write an affidavit arguing against it, on grounds that if people know how many calories are in the food they eat, they actually might get fatter. The Center for Consumer Freedom, a notorious front group for the restaurant industry, has also thrown its weight against the rule, complaining that "the food cop campaign will plaster our nation's menus with warning labels." SOURCE: New York Times, February 16, 2008 4. THE TRUTH ABOUT LYING http://www.prwatch.org/node/7032 Gawker.com, the media gossip blog, recently had a testy exchange with Richard Edelman, CEO of the giant Edelman public relations firm, after Gawker published an item which quoted an unnamed Edelman employee who reportedly advised a client, "Sometimes, you just have to stand up there and lie. Make the audience or the reporter believe that everything is ok." Richard Edelman responded by telling Gawker that the report was "completely false and needs to be taken down. You bet we take ethics seriously." This in turn prompted a rejoinder from Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan, who retorted that Edelman himself had been dishonest about the nature of his company's work for Wal-Mart. "You lied and said that the 100% company-controlled Astroturf group 'Working Families for Wal-Mart' was 'A real group of people, as far as I know,'" Nolan stated. "I made the case that that was a blatant lie when I was at PRWeek, and I still believe it." Nolan also pointed to a detailed report in New Yorker magazine, which detailed Edelman's work for Wal-Mart, including its effort to "co-opt liberals" with the help of former environmentalist turned PR pro Leslie Dachs. SOURCE: Gawker.com, February 14, 2008 5. GREAT LAKES STUDY SUPPRESSED http://www.prwatch.org/node/7030 "For more than seven months, the nation's top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states, reportedly because it contains such potentially 'alarming information' as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates," reports Sheila Kaplan. The 400-page study, undertaken by a division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in cooperation with the government of Canada, "warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen 'areas of concern' -- including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee -- may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants." Canadian biologist Michael Gilbertson, who was involved in reviewing the study, said it has been suppressed because it suggests that vulnerable populations have been harmed by industrial pollutants. "It's not good because it's inconvenient," Gilbertson said. "The whole problem with all this kind of work is wrapped up in that word 'injury.' If you have injury, that implies liability. Liability, of course, implies damages, legal processes, and costs of remedial action. The governments, frankly, in both countries are so heavily aligned with, particularly, the chemical industry, that the word amongst the bureaucracies is that they really do not want any evidence of effect or injury to be allowed out there." SOURCE: Center for Public Integrity, February 7, 2008 6. WEEKLY RADIO SPIN: COACHING STUDENTS TO PROTECT CORPORATIONS http://www.prwatch.org/node/7029 Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at Putin pushers, Coach in the classroom and how comic books promote Iraqi special forces. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at the Lincoln Group, spreading their spin beyond Iraq. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks! SOURCE: Center for Media and Democracy, February 22, 2008 7. CONTROVERSY GROWS OVER CANADIAN SKEPTICS AD CAMPAIGN http://www.prwatch.org/node/7027 The fallout from the SourceWatch profile on the Canadian global warming skeptics group, Friends of Science (FoS), continues to grow. Mike De Souza reports that Morten Paulsen, who is Senior Vice President and General Manager Fleishman-Hillard Canada, worked as a "volunteer spokesperson for the Conservatives at the same time that he was acting as a paid communications consultant for the Friends of Science." FoS ran a major radio advertising campaign attacking the former Liberal government for its commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions. When FoS president Douglas Leahey was asked who identified the target markets for the ads he stated "I would imagine that would have been (decided by) our public relations consultant (Paulsen)." Paulsen declined to comment on Leahey's suggestion. Liberal member of parliament Mark Holland said that it appeared that Paulsen "might have been directing what ridings specifically material went into and using (the group) as an arm of the Conservative Party of Canada and thus circumventing campaign financing rules." SOURCE: Canwest News Service, February 21, 2008 8. FAKE VS. FAKES http://www.prwatch.org/node/7024 Hunter College professor Stuart Ewen is crying foul about an "anti-counterfeiting campaign" sponsored on his campus by the Coach Corporation, a manufacturer of handbags, shoes and other women's accessories. To "educate" students about the dangers of knockoff imitatators, Coach paid the university to host a course in "stealth marketing" that involved plastering the campus with fake flyers about the problems of a fictional student named "Heidi Cee," who claimed that she had been conned by a counterfeit Coach handbag. "A corporation-funded university class with a curriculum created by corporate lobbyists is questionable enough," writes Ben Kessler. "According to Ewen, it appears that the class was the result of a direct request made by the president of the university to the department head. No tenured teachers were told about the department's new curricular direction; an untenured (therefore more pliable) faculty member with no marketing background was selected to teach the class. The anointed instructor voiced objections ... but ended up teaching the course anyway, with continuous supervision from a Coach lawyer. At no time, the Coach overseer stipulated, was the company's involvement to be mentioned in any of the completed class projects." The class assignments focused on creating an elaborate fabric of lies using "authentic-seeming fliers, social networking websites, and a blog" supposedly written by "Heidi Cee," in which the fictional student begged real students to help her find her missing Coach handbag and talked about the problem of fake products. When Ewen questioned the Ohio-based public relations firm that created the course about Heidi Cee's fabrications, they replied, "That's what kids do these days: create fake people on the internet." SOURCE: Ben Kessler's blog, February 19, 2008 9. TELECOM WAR ON NET NEUTRALITY http://www.prwatch.org/node/7023 "Telecommunications industry groups have attacked a new bill calling for government regulators to take a closer look at how broadband providers manage their networks," reports Kenneth Corin. "The Internet Freedom Preservation Act, introduced earlier this week by Rep. Ed Markey, the Democratic chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunication and the Internet, could make it illegal for service providers to block or degrade traffic on their networks. Its introduction revisits the contentious debate over Net neutrality, which has industry groups championing the free market and warning that government intervention threatens to choke off growth and innovation in the Internet economy." (As an example of the kind of "innovation" they have in mind, PC World magazine warned recently that consumers should "get ready for a crackdown on broadband use" in which "Internet users may soon be charged extra for using 'too much' bandwidth or cut off from using some bandwidth-hungry software applications.") SOURCE: Enterprise Networking Planet, February 15, 2008 10. A COMICAL ATTEMPT TO WIN YOUNG HEARTS AND MINDS http://www.prwatch.org/node/7022 Want to earn up to $2.4 million to produce and distribute across Iraq 12 issues of a comic book designed to "highlight the professionalism of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) and to enhance the public perception of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) as a capable, well-trained, and professional fighting force"? Well, you'll have to compete with the Lincoln Group, the PR firm that previously placed U.S. propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. Last year, the "sole source contract for the 6th Brigade Comic Book went to the Lincoln Group," reports Sharon Weinberger. The comics seem to be a continuation of a project that the Center for Media and Democracy noted back in 2005, when U.S. PsyOps troops were working on "initial character and plot development" for the series. Everyone from the United Nations to the Business Software Alliance has used comics to target young audiences. Wired points out that the U.S. Army also distributes comics in the Philippines, to get an anti-terror, pro-miltiary message to the youth of the country's Sulu islands. SOURCE: Wired blog "Danger Room," February 19, 2008 11. KETCHUM CAUGHT "MAN OF THE YEAR" TITLE FOR PUTIN http://www.prwatch.org/node/7021 Ketchum, the PR firm involved in the Armstrong Williams "pundit payola" scandal, helped Vladimir Putin become Time magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2007. The firm also conducted "dozens of media briefings in Moscow, New York and Washington, D.C. for both the Russian Federation and its natural gas monopoly Gazprom," reports O'Dwyer's. Ketchum was paid $845,000 for two months of work for the Russian Federation in early 2007, around the G8 Summit and visits to Moscow by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Ketchum has a $250,000 per month contract with Gazprom; the gas company also pays the Gavin Anderson firm $100,000 per month. In 2007, Ketchum's Gazprom work included "several press and think tank briefings," and organizing "meetings as executives visited the U.S. in late November and early December." SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily (sub req'd), February 20, 2008 12. BANK CASE PROVES INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE http://www.prwatch.org/node/7019 "In a move that legal experts said could present a major test of First Amendment rights in the Internet area, a federal judge in San Francisco ... ordered the disabling of a Web site devoted to disclosing confidential information." The site, Wikileaks, allows people to anonymously post documents and other information. The judge's order disabled the site's U.S. domain name, Wikileaks.org, though the site can still be reached through other addresses. The case was brought by Julius Baer Bank and Trust in the Cayman Islands, after documents allegedly linking the bank to "asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion" were posted on Wikileaks. A later ruling by the same judge "ordered Wikileaks to stop distributing the bank documents." But, in an "overwhelming response" to the case, "'mirror' copies of the website sprouted like weeds" and "bloggers and other fans of the site gave new life to [the] leaked documents the bank was working to suppress," reports the Guardian. "Clearly, the court and Bank Julius Baer underestimated the ingenuity of the web development community," reads a post on the Project on Government Oversight's blog. SOURCE: New York Times, February 20, 2008 13. TAKING A STAND FOR THEIR COMMUNITIES' HEALTH http://www.prwatch.org/node/7018 Low-income California communities concerned with environmental justice have launched a 21-point "Environmental Justice Movement Declaration." Their position is a challenge to the policies of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is a "national advocate of a cap-and-trade program that would allow heavy polluters, often located in poor neighborhoods, to partly buy their way out of lowering their emissions." Eighteen groups signed the Declaration, including San Joaquin Valley Latino Environmental Advance Project, Oakland's West County Toxics Coalition, the L.A. chapter of the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Delano's Assn. of Irritated Residents. Absent were the "Big Green" groups like Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. "'Under a trading scheme, 11 power plants to be built around Los Angeles could offset emissions by extracting methane from coal seams in Utah or planting trees in Manitoba,' said Jane Williams of the California Communities Against Toxics, which fights pollution in low-income areas." "Cap and trade is a charade to continue business as usual," said Angela Johnson Meszaros, director of the California Environmental Rights Alliance. Cap and trade is an element of the climate bill that has the most support in Congress. It is sponsored by Sens. John Warner of Virginia and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2008 -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Weekly Spin features selected news summaries with links to further information about media, political spin and propaganda. It is emailed free each Wednesday to subscribers. PR Watch, Spin of the Day, the Weekly Spin and SourceWatch 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@prwatch.org. 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