The following e-newsletter is a great place to find out what the issues are in modern journalism. We will use the issue below as talk points and to get you familiar with the vocabulary of journalism.
From: weekly-spin@prwatch.org
Subject: The Weekly Spin, April 20, 2005
Date: April 21, 2005 12:42:01 AM JST
To: weekly-spin@prwatch.org
Reply-To: weekly-spin@prwatch.org
THE WEEKLY SPIN, April 20, 2005
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THIS WEEK'S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. The FCC on "Fake News": Who's Trying to Persuade You?
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Praising the Golden CAFTA
2. Getting Spin with a Little Help from Friends
3. Trust Us, We're Paid TV Experts!
4. Heritage Foundation's Asian Belle
5. Red Flags Ignored in Williams Case
6. Unhappy Campers
7. Good and Bad News on Fake News
8. Bad Brains: Mad Cow Cover-Up?
9. Travelobbying
10. Welcome to Our Lair, Murdoch Says to Bloggers
11. Israel Moves to Muzzle Nuclear Whistleblower
----------------------------------------------------------------------
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. THE FCC ON "FAKE NEWS": WHO'S TRYING TO PERSUADE YOU?
by Diane Farsetta
"Listeners and viewers are entitled to know who seeks to persuade
them," noted the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, in a Public
Notice (PDF file, Word file) released last night.
The Public Notice was precipitated, in part, by the "large
number of requests" asking the FCC to "consider whether the use of
'video news releases' or 'VNRs' ... complies with the Commission's
sponsorship identification rules." Those requests came from the more
than 40,000 people who signed onto a petition circulated by the
Center for Media and Democracy and the media reform group Free Press
(you can still sign the petition, here), as well as from two U.S.
Senators.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3592
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. PRAISING THE GOLDEN CAFTA
http://www.truthabouttrade.org/article.asp?id=3659
"A fierce battle over the Central American Free Trade Agreement is
expected," reported the Grand Forks Herald. "The agreement needs the
approval of both houses of Congress. ... Bush administration
officials launched a campaign in rural America to urge farmers to
convince Congress to approve the CAFTA." Last month, Chief
Agricultural Negotiator Allen Johnson "acknowledged that there is a
'perception' in Iowa and other farm states that trade agreements are
not achieving the benefits that were expected." Yet the Agriculture
Coalition for CAFTA-DR, comprised of "over 55 food and agricultural
organizations committed to quick passage of CAFTA-DR," released an
"economic impact study that identifies the gains 40 congressional
districts could expect upon passage," reported Meatingplace.com. The
study is posted on the National Pork Producers Council website and
promoted by the Business Coalition for U.S. - Central America Trade.
According to Roll Call, "GOP lobbyists crammed into Room HC-5 of the
Capitol last Thursday ... to show K Street that Senate and House
Whips have coordinated their efforts - and that they continue to
need lobbyists' help if they are to pass major items on the business
agenda," including CAFTA.
SOURCE: Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota), April 6, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3605
2. GETTING SPIN WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM FRIENDS
"As House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) faces increasing scrutiny
over various allegations of ethical lapses, a powerful cadre of
friends and colleagues is stepping up to help protect his image,"
reports PR Week. DeLay legal advisor and former Republican National
Committee strategist Barbara Comstock heads the group, which
includes DCI Group's Stuart Roy and Edelman's Jonathan Grella. They
are "placing supporters on cable news channels and radio talk
shows," distributing talking points to conservative groups, and
asking "prominent conservatives," including Ketchum's Susan
Molinari, "to speak out on DeLay's behalf." This "unofficial PR
offensive" is separate from DeLay's congressional office, which
"developed its own media war room to combat the accusations." On the
other side, Fenton Communications is working with MoveOn.org,
Campaign for America's Future and Common Cause "to tarnish and
ultimately unseat" DeLay.
SOURCE: PR Week (sub. req'd.), April 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3604
3. TRUST US, WE'RE PAID TV EXPERTS!
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111386025685009961,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus
"The use of TV consumer experts is the latest way marketers have
tried to disguise their promotions as real news," similar to
magazine "'advertorials' designed to look like editorial features"
and video news releases aired as TV reports. The stable of paid
"experts" includes "Today" show tech-product reviewer Corey
Greenberg, "trend and fashion expert" Katlean de Monchy, Popular
Photography & Imaging magazine editor John Owens, and Child magazine
tech editor James Oppenheim. The Wall Street Journal reports that
all four "experts" have neglected to disclose to viewers that they
received payments to promote products being discussed. Journal
reporter James Bandler writes, "TV shows present these gurus'
recommendations as unbiased and based solely on their expertise. But
that presentation is misleading if the experts have been paid to
mention products."
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd.), April 19, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3603
4. HERITAGE FOUNDATION'S ASIAN BELLE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59539-2005Apr16.html
As happened with neighboring Indonesia, "the 9/11 attacks opened the
door to improved U.S.-Malaysia relations." The Heritage Foundation
began promoting Malaysia in mid-2001, "at the same time a Hong Kong
consulting firm co-founded by Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage's
president, began representing Malaysian business interests." The
firm, Belle Haven Consultants, lists Feulner's wife and Heritage
consultant Ken Sheffer among its staff. "To help represent Malaysian
clients," Belle Haven hired the Republican lobbying firm Alexander
Strategy Group. "Experts say that the relationship between one of
Washington's most influential conservative think tanks and a network
of lobbying firms collecting fees from Malaysian business interests
- well in excess of $1 million over two years - could pose a problem
for Heritage's status as a nonprofit group," reports the Washington
Post.
SOURCE: Washington Post, April 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3602
5. RED FLAGS IGNORED IN WILLIAMS CASE
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-armstrong16apr16,0,2006695.story?coll=la-home-headlines
The report by the Education Department's inspector general on
Armstrong Williams, a pundit paid $240,000 to advertise and advocate
for the No Child Left Behind Act, notes that the White House "was
told about potential problems," but that did not "prevent the
contract from being renewed." The report found no evidence that
President Bush or senior staff knew about Williams, but "a midlevel
White House aide received calls from Education officials concerned
about the contract's cost, its effectiveness and Williams' dual role
as journalist and government public relations man." This finding
contradicts Bush's January 2005 statement that "we didn't know about
this in the White House." Education Secretary Margaret Spellings,
who "declined to be interviewed" for the report, said she would
"immediately adopt the report's recommendations for improvements in
contract oversight." Whether the contract "breached federal rules
prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds to 'covertly distribute
propaganda'" is being investigated separately.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3601
6. UNHAPPY CAMPERS
http://www.crikey.com.au
The president of the Public Relations Institute of Australia's
(PRIA) Victoria chapter, David Hawkins, bluntly summarised the
results of a membership survey as, "Most people think the PRIA
sucks. The average score across all members was about four out of a
possible nine." In the Australian e-zine Crikey.com.au, Hugo Kelly
reports that survey results included the suggestion that the PRIA
run "a public relations campaign - ongoing - to explain, and where
necessary, defend, public relations." Over the next two weeks, PRIA
chapters in Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland are hosting
events for Ross S. Irvine, the president of his own firm, ePublic
Relations. Irvine, who describes himself as a "corporate warrior,"
promises to tell his Australian audience "how to beat activists at
their own game."
SOURCE: Crikey.com.au (sub. reqâ??d.), April 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3598
7. GOOD AND BAD NEWS ON FAKE NEWS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/politics/15armstrong.html
Following the FCC's Public Notice on "fake news," the U.S. Senate
approved, by 98 to 0, a measure requiring "clear notification within
the text or audio of the prepackaged news story" for all fake news
produced with federal funding. The measure was offered by Senator
Robert Byrd and inserted into an emergency spending bill for Iraq
and Afghanistan operations. But not all of Washington DC has seen
the light on fake news. Representative George Miller warned that the
Department of Education's investigation into the Ketchum - Armstrong
Williams payola scandal is being obstructed. The Department's
Inspector General was "'denied access' to some current and former
White House employees," while Secretary Margaret Spellings is
"considering invoking special privileges that would force the
investigator to shield parts of his findings from the public,"
according to Miller.
SOURCE: New York Times, April 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3595
8. BAD BRAINS: MAD COW COVER-UP?
http://sask.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=mad-cow-concerns050413
"The United States did not properly analyze two suspected cases of
mad cow disease in 1997," reported Canada's CBC News. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture veterinarian who investigated the cases,
Dr. Masuo Doi (now retired), said he is "haunted by fears that the
right tests were not done" and wonders, "How many did we miss?" and
"Can you really trust our inspection [system]?" With both potential
mad cow (also called BSE) cases, "key areas of the brain where signs
of BSE would be most noticeable were never tested." At the time, a
USDA scientist called his examination of one case "questionable,"
because "he couldn't tell what part of the cow's brain he was
looking at." Two other current or former USDA staff, Dr. Karl
Langheindrich and Lester Friedlander, supported Dr. Doi's claims.
SOURCE: CBC News, April 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3596
9. TRAVELOBBYING
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111351750759807490,00.html
"A fast-growing trend in the business of influencing government is
corporate-funded trips," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Because
the trips are paid for by corporations and trade associations - and
not the hired guns who lobby for them - such trips are permitted
under House and Senate rules," unless the sponsors are registered
lobbyists or foreign agents. The number of junkets increased from
1,400 in 2000 to 1,900 in 2004; their cost increased 50% over the
same period, to $3 million in 2004. Already this year, the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce "has flown more than a dozen House and Senate
aides to the Dominican Republic to learn about trade." The American
Association of Airport Executives, Consumer Electronics Association,
National Association of Broadcasters, and Advanced Medical
Technology Association have also funded trips, as have groups within
the finance, telecommunications, agriculture, and energy industries,
with "members of both parties ... taking advantage."
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd.), April 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3597
10. WELCOME TO OUR LAIR, MURDOCH SAYS TO BLOGGERS
http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_247.html
In a speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors'
conference, News Corporation chief executive Rupert Murdoch pondered
the impact that the growth in online news is having on newspapers.
"The trends are against us," he warned. Murdoch also mused on the
possibilities of harnessing bloggers to the corporate news cart. "We
need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage
readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our
reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a
particular story was reported or researched or presented."
Newspapers might experiment with using bloggers to extend coverage,
he suggested. However, Murdoch cautioned that bloggers could pose a
risk to "our standards for accuracy and reliability."
SOURCE: News Corporation, April 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3594
11. ISRAEL MOVES TO MUZZLE NUCLEAR WHISTLEBLOWER
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/564195.html
At a preliminary court hearing, Israeli whistleblower Mordechai
Vanunu declined to enter a plea on twenty-one charges that he spoke
with U.S., British, Australian and French journalists. After
revealing the existence of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the
U.K. newspaper the Sunday Times in 1986, Vanunu was imprisoned for
eighteen years. He was released on April 21, 2004, subject to
draconian restrictions on his ability to travel or speak to
reporters about Israel's weapons of mass destruction. "As a human
being, I have the right to express my political views and my ideas.
I have no more secrets," he told reporters outside the courtroom
Tuesday. The next hearing is scheduled for May 19.
SOURCE: Haaretz, April 12, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3593
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
The Columbia School of Journalism is considered to be one of the best in the World and the universities Pulitzer Prize in many different catagories is thought to be the highest award in the U.S.
L.A. Times gets public service Pulitzer
New York, NY, Apr. 5 (UPI) -- New York's Columbia University has given its coveted annual Pulitzer Prize awards and the public service honor went to the Los Angeles Times.
The Times, owned by the Tribune Co., won the public service prize for an investigative series on an area hospital's atrocious healthcare -- without citing a single confidential source.
The Pulitzer committee also awarded prizes in the international-reporting category to two Tribune papers: The Los Angeles Times for coverage of Russia, and Newsday of Melville, N.Y., for coverage of Rwanda.
The Wall Street Journal, owned by Dow Jones & Co., also won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for its film reviews and another for its coverage of cancer survivors.
Pulitzers are given annually in 14 journalism categories and seven arts categories.
L.A. Times gets public service Pulitzer
New York, NY, Apr. 5 (UPI) -- New York's Columbia University has given its coveted annual Pulitzer Prize awards and the public service honor went to the Los Angeles Times.
The Times, owned by the Tribune Co., won the public service prize for an investigative series on an area hospital's atrocious healthcare -- without citing a single confidential source.
The Pulitzer committee also awarded prizes in the international-reporting category to two Tribune papers: The Los Angeles Times for coverage of Russia, and Newsday of Melville, N.Y., for coverage of Rwanda.
The Wall Street Journal, owned by Dow Jones & Co., also won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for its film reviews and another for its coverage of cancer survivors.
Pulitzers are given annually in 14 journalism categories and seven arts categories.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
JFL or Japanese as a foreign language - is it difficult to learn to speak? Well according to this article, no it's not.
COUNTERPOINT
Does language 'difficulty' speak of a sense beyond mere words?
By ROGER PULVERS
Special to The Japan Times
I have often been told by Japanese people that theirs is the most difficult language in the world. Virtually all the Japanese people who have said this to me, I might add, have spoken no other language than their own.
The most conspicuous instance of this came my way in the mid-1980s when, one rainy night, I took a cab home from the station at Seijo Gakuenmae in Tokyo. No sooner had I closed my umbrella and entered the cab than the driver peered at me in the rearview mirror and said, in Japanese: "You're not a Japanese are you."
"No, I'm not," I replied.
"Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn't it?"
Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.
"I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!"
Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.
"Well, anyway," he said, "Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!"
Now, for a non-native speaker, acquiring the ability to read and write Japanese takes tremendous effort. But my driver and I were discussing the spoken language, the medium by which most Japanese explain themselves to their compatriots and the outside world.
Japanese, of the languages that I know, is actually the easiest spoken language to master.
For one thing, the number of words used in daily life is small compared to, say, English. Nuances in English are added by expressing an emotion with the use of any number of different words, incorporating layer upon layer of subtle meaning by dipping into what is an enormous chest of verbal riches. In Japanese, subtleties are added with the use of a variety of endings. When you get to the end of a sentence you can vary the tone, register and emphasis of what you say by using one or more of a number of word and sentence endings. These endings are not hard to master. The result is that a non-native can be very expressive and articulate in Japanese without having to learn thousands of words -- in the case of English, words that came from Anglo-Saxon, Latin and the many other languages that have enriched its vocabulary.
And, you can pause, mumble, leave out core elements of sentences, even punctuate dialogue with long silences and still speak excellent Japanese! The other languages that I am familiar with do not allow for the huge pregnant pauses and embarrassing elipses that allow valuable thinking time for non-native beginners. What is considered an acceptable pause in Japanese, often giving the impression of profundity, would be taken for pure prevarication in English.
Verbs are generally the horror element of language learning. In English they are irregular, with auxiliary verbs and the conditional to make matters worse. Slavic languages have the perfective and the imperfective, not to mention so-called verbs of motion. (You need a different verb for "to go" depending on whether you are walking or riding in something.) Japanese verbs are a cinch. Just change the ending of the verb's stem to get everything from "I eat" to "I ate," "I didn't eat," "I wouldn't have eaten," "I didn't want to eat," "even if I didn't want to eat" and "Sorry but I went and ate it," which is tabechatta. Easy as pie.
Why did my taxi driver at Seijo Gakuenmae persist in perpetrating the myth of difficulty? Is it just a benign ignorance of the workings of language, or is there something else at work here?
Is his quaint obstinacy an indication of a wished-for ethnic "exclusivity"?
I believe that this irrational belief in the difficulty of their language bestows upon Japanese people, willy nilly, a false mystique, as if through their language they were able to harbor secrets to which the outside world could never be privy. This false mystique allows them to entertain a feeling of national sharing without having to prove it explicitly. "We all think and feel the same way," it tells them, "and we can express this in a way that is only open to Japanese. The fact that non-Japanese cannot decipher this is proof of our ethnic cohesion." If they admit that the Japanese language is no harder than any other, and maybe even easier in some ways, their self-styled aura of exclusivity loses much of its shine.
Over the years, a number of Japanese politicians have dropped what are essentially racist clangers, the most famous perhaps being Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's unseemly remark about the "low intellectual level" of certain American minorities. These politicians, speaking in Japanese of course, put their foot in their mouth and yet are taken aback when foreign journalists vividly describe the heel protruding from their lips. Do they really think that their language is a code that cannot be deciphered by non-Japanese?
In former times it may have served the Japanese national cause for this country's people to be seen as shuffling in a foggy aura of inscrutability. By striving to be "not understood" and holding their cards close to their chest, so to speak, they bolstered their position. "We Japanese have a depth that you cannot fathom, and this is the source of our power." But in our explain-yourself-or-pay-the-price era, where the very survival of a nation's culture may depend on its ability to express its people's aspirations in a clear and unequivocal manner, the myth of difficulty is no more than an artificial obstacle, a high wall that locks Japanese people in more than it deters the rest of the world from entering.
It is time that Japanese people rejoiced in the fact that people around the world can and, despite Japanese provincial biases and nostalgic predilections, will understand them.
The Japan Times: April 3, 2005
COUNTERPOINT
Does language 'difficulty' speak of a sense beyond mere words?
By ROGER PULVERS
Special to The Japan Times
I have often been told by Japanese people that theirs is the most difficult language in the world. Virtually all the Japanese people who have said this to me, I might add, have spoken no other language than their own.
The most conspicuous instance of this came my way in the mid-1980s when, one rainy night, I took a cab home from the station at Seijo Gakuenmae in Tokyo. No sooner had I closed my umbrella and entered the cab than the driver peered at me in the rearview mirror and said, in Japanese: "You're not a Japanese are you."
"No, I'm not," I replied.
"Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn't it?"
Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.
"I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!"
Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.
"Well, anyway," he said, "Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!"
Now, for a non-native speaker, acquiring the ability to read and write Japanese takes tremendous effort. But my driver and I were discussing the spoken language, the medium by which most Japanese explain themselves to their compatriots and the outside world.
Japanese, of the languages that I know, is actually the easiest spoken language to master.
For one thing, the number of words used in daily life is small compared to, say, English. Nuances in English are added by expressing an emotion with the use of any number of different words, incorporating layer upon layer of subtle meaning by dipping into what is an enormous chest of verbal riches. In Japanese, subtleties are added with the use of a variety of endings. When you get to the end of a sentence you can vary the tone, register and emphasis of what you say by using one or more of a number of word and sentence endings. These endings are not hard to master. The result is that a non-native can be very expressive and articulate in Japanese without having to learn thousands of words -- in the case of English, words that came from Anglo-Saxon, Latin and the many other languages that have enriched its vocabulary.
And, you can pause, mumble, leave out core elements of sentences, even punctuate dialogue with long silences and still speak excellent Japanese! The other languages that I am familiar with do not allow for the huge pregnant pauses and embarrassing elipses that allow valuable thinking time for non-native beginners. What is considered an acceptable pause in Japanese, often giving the impression of profundity, would be taken for pure prevarication in English.
Verbs are generally the horror element of language learning. In English they are irregular, with auxiliary verbs and the conditional to make matters worse. Slavic languages have the perfective and the imperfective, not to mention so-called verbs of motion. (You need a different verb for "to go" depending on whether you are walking or riding in something.) Japanese verbs are a cinch. Just change the ending of the verb's stem to get everything from "I eat" to "I ate," "I didn't eat," "I wouldn't have eaten," "I didn't want to eat," "even if I didn't want to eat" and "Sorry but I went and ate it," which is tabechatta. Easy as pie.
Why did my taxi driver at Seijo Gakuenmae persist in perpetrating the myth of difficulty? Is it just a benign ignorance of the workings of language, or is there something else at work here?
Is his quaint obstinacy an indication of a wished-for ethnic "exclusivity"?
I believe that this irrational belief in the difficulty of their language bestows upon Japanese people, willy nilly, a false mystique, as if through their language they were able to harbor secrets to which the outside world could never be privy. This false mystique allows them to entertain a feeling of national sharing without having to prove it explicitly. "We all think and feel the same way," it tells them, "and we can express this in a way that is only open to Japanese. The fact that non-Japanese cannot decipher this is proof of our ethnic cohesion." If they admit that the Japanese language is no harder than any other, and maybe even easier in some ways, their self-styled aura of exclusivity loses much of its shine.
Over the years, a number of Japanese politicians have dropped what are essentially racist clangers, the most famous perhaps being Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's unseemly remark about the "low intellectual level" of certain American minorities. These politicians, speaking in Japanese of course, put their foot in their mouth and yet are taken aback when foreign journalists vividly describe the heel protruding from their lips. Do they really think that their language is a code that cannot be deciphered by non-Japanese?
In former times it may have served the Japanese national cause for this country's people to be seen as shuffling in a foggy aura of inscrutability. By striving to be "not understood" and holding their cards close to their chest, so to speak, they bolstered their position. "We Japanese have a depth that you cannot fathom, and this is the source of our power." But in our explain-yourself-or-pay-the-price era, where the very survival of a nation's culture may depend on its ability to express its people's aspirations in a clear and unequivocal manner, the myth of difficulty is no more than an artificial obstacle, a high wall that locks Japanese people in more than it deters the rest of the world from entering.
It is time that Japanese people rejoiced in the fact that people around the world can and, despite Japanese provincial biases and nostalgic predilections, will understand them.
The Japan Times: April 3, 2005
Monday, March 28, 2005
This is from the DigitalJournalist.org and gives a good report on what is happening in the real world of contemporary journalism:
TV News in a Postmodern World
Convention versus the Internet
March 2005
by Terry Heaton
The only thing worse than a square peg in a round hole is a square peg trying to get into a round hole.
Long ago, in one of my news director jobs, a young man showed up at the small market station and asked to speak with me. In the lobby, I was greeted by a fellow -- tape in hand -- who was just about the strangest looking job candidate I'd ever encountered. He was what Ichabod Crane would've seen when looking in the mirrow -- a neck four sizes too small for his collar, hooked nose, ears perpendicular to his head, and a mangled wad of hair on top.
"I've been traveling the country for the past year," he said, "talking to small market news directors about getting that first on-air reporting job out of college."
I invited him into my office, looked over his resume and tape, and told him the facts of life about working in a business that demands cosmetic perfection. He was stunned. All the way through school and through a yearlong interview process, no one had suggested that he had a face for radio.
He was a square peg trying to get into a round hole.
So it is in the war between convention and the Internet, and there is indeed a war underway. While the conflict is everywhere, the inability to see the real battle lines has created a significant structural barrier as old media companies struggle with infiltrating the new. Convention sees the surface, but the war is underneath. Square peg, meet round hole.
The debate between the mainstream media and the blogosphere is one highly visible example.
Convention believes that what has been will always be, while the Internet shoots from the hip in a blaze of entrepreneurial gunfire. Like a patient father, convention smiles at the imagination of these children, but when the pushing and shoving begins, it steps in with its infinite wisdom and a resounding, "Enough!" In doing so online, however, convention runs the square peg/round hole risk, because the structure here cannot and will not run from the top-down, regardless of who wants to be the father. The rules of convention can backfire badly, and this is precisely what's happening in the unseen nooks and crannies of New Media.
The guardians of convention are the lawyers of the land. Their lifeblood is codified rules that can be manipulated from the top, and whenever circumstances impose barriers to this, new rules are simply created to continue convention. The problem with convention's rules is that they don't apply online, because there is no control mechanism.
When CBS released its Memogate report, they did a smart thing. Along with the story of network action in the wake of the report, CBSNews.com also provided its users access to the entire 234-page report. This was presented in Adobe PDF format, a popular software for transmitting documents for printing. Bloggers and other Internet communicators dislike PDF, because the text in the format isn't easily copied for reproduction in other forms of media, especially those online. Nevertheless, it can be done, but there were still complaints from the blogosphere about the network choice of PDF. These were overshadowed, however, by the fact that CBS had released the entire report.
Bring in the lawyers. Two days later, the PDF file was replaced by one with Digital Rights Management restrictions enabled, which completely prevented copying any of the text electronically. This was a bad move by CBS. It infuriated the blogosphere and further alienated the same people who broke the original story that caused the network so much embarrassment in the first place. The network's lawyers responded that they did it to prevent anybody from making and distributing a bogus copy (or parody) of the document. This was an act of convention trying to wiggle its way into the round hole of the Internet.
From an Internet perspective -- where the law of attraction rules -- the action of the lawyers was almost laughable, but the CBS team of attorneys viewed it as a logical and rational response, because their world is top-down, command and control. Like other Modernist institutions, CBS is addicted to being right, and feeding their addiction has blinded them to what's really taking place in the world around them.
The Achilles' Heel of convention is its insistence that what has been will always be. This is what led New York Times columnist Bill Safire to suggest that bloggers are just waiting to become a part of the mainstream, which is where the money is found.
Blogs will compete with op-ed columns for "views you can use," and the best will morph out of the pajama game to deliver serious analysis and fresh information, someday prospering with ads and subscriptions. The prospect of profit will bring bloggers in from the meanstream to the mainstream center of comment and local news coverage.
The "prospect of profit" can never be a value proposition for the blogosphere, because it would be another square peg looking to get into a round hole. The currency of the blogosphere is passionate involvement and the sense of closure that comes with participation. Citizen journalism's great power is its voluntary involvement in the things that matter to its various denizens. Nothing kills passion like money, and while there certainly may be bloggers who make lots of money, they will then have to morph into the rules of convention and, therefore, lose the street creds earned within the very community in which they used to dwell. This is inevitable, and those who propose a prospering blogging community with ads and subscriptions are fooling themselves.
Convention demands control while the blogosphere rejects it. The disruptive innovations that permit an individual to be his or her own publisher -- whether text or video -- aren't what's fueling the citizen journalism revolution. It's the distribution system, one that has no top or bottom, and wherein audience is determined by the readers/viewers, not by the publisher or network. Moreover, the relationship between blog writer and blog reader is far different than that of editorial writer and newspaper consumer. Why? Because the readers of blogs aren't just reading. They're also judging and thinking and writing and linking. A viable blog doesn't broadcast. It a part of a conversation, and conversation is, well, free.
There's an important discussion underway about whether the Internet is a medium or a place. Convention understands and welcomes the former, but the latter is the actual reality. Cyberspace is still space, and the immutable laws are a little different here. A medium moves content from one place to another, usually outward. A space is where people gather and share the experience. Conversations are two-way in a space. A medium moves messages in one direction. This ads to the square peg/round hole problem.
Despite the arguments of those within the institution of the fourth estate, the role of the so-called "professional" press is the manufacture of consent. This was the dream of its founder, Walter Lippmann, who introduced the idea of an educated and elite class to control the uneducated masses 100 years ago. However, the role of the blogosphere is the deconstruction of that consent, with the resultant hope of establishing a more universal consent at street level. Square peg, meet round hole.
Convention's most dangerous trap is to seduce that which is new. Like the Borg of Star Trek, it boldly proclaims that resistence is futile and that assimilation is the only way. Convention must assimilate or be destroyed and replaced by something else. As Picasso said, "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." That which is being destroyed -- the fatted calf that went before -- doesn't want to let go, but that's exactly what's happening in this brave, new world of ours. This is why people like Mr. Safire, and those who rest comfortably within convention, can see only what has been.
PR guru and blogger, Steve Rubel, wrote of the "rock star" status of some bloggers.
With interest in blogs rising, some bloggers are rapidly becoming celebrities. They're popping up in the press, attracting flocks of followers and, in some cases, even a roster of advertisers. And why not? They deserve it. After all, these "A-listers" can easily sway the opinions of thousands.
This is convention trying to seduce a threat. Steve encourages companies to invest in endorsement deals and the like with bloggers, because it's smart business. Square peg, meet round hole.
In an article called "Blogger Backlash," New York Press writer Russ Smith notes the conflict between the mainstream press and bloggers:
"The bloggers - "citizen journalists," pajama pundits, whatever you want to call them - are reaching millions of Americans, and while many will be co-opted by traditional media companies, it's a kick in the pants and skirts of the Beltway cocktail party crowd, whose precious words and broadcasts don't matter as much anymore."
Note the assumption that bloggers will (of course) be "co-opted by traditional media companies." Assimilation. Resistance is futile.
George Simpson wrote for MediaDailyNews that blogging is a hobby that won't pay the rent, so Rubel's idea of payola to grab extra income is appealing. Simpson sees what's really happening.
One of the things that make blogs appealing is that they have no rules. But no rules mean that they will never escape the shadow of doubt. (Not that having rules stopped payola in any other industry.) So let's not overreact to bloggers and understand that they are subject to the same corruption that infects every other medium. With one tiny exception: they are accountable to no one.
In addressing media companies who are experimenting with citizen journalists, Poynter's Steve Outing writes that the idea of identifying your best citizen journalists and paying them as they continue contributing isn't a bad one. "But perhaps a better idea is to pay frequent contributors with goodies like t-shirts, caps, and coffee mugs -- all emblazoned with the brand name of the website, of course." This is smart, because it doesn't force the assimilation issue. It simply recognizes the contribution of everyday citizens and differentiates them from professional journalists. Once they get paid, they've been assimilated.
When discussing the Internet and the blogosphere with media people who are uninformed, the first question that's usually asked is, "Where's the money?" It's an understandable question, because we're so indoctrinated in the laws of mass marketing that nothing else is real or valuable. The top wants to be shown how the bottom will support its position. But this is the heart of the misunderstanding about the Internet in general and the blogosphere in particular. Certainly, there's money to be made online, but if we approach it only from convention, our minds will be closed to the infinite possibilities it offers.
Broadcasting needs to return to its roots in order to have a successful future, and I'm not talking about the business basics. In its infancy, the industry was driven by an entrepreneurial spirit that brought us innovation after innovation and built a model that lasted for 50 years. But the business rules and concepts that carried the industry are exactly what's killing it today, and the only way out of that is to get back to that entrepreneurial spirit. Invite the right-brainers around you; get out the whiteboards and zero base your company.
I often think of that young man who came to see me so long ago, and I wonder what happened to him. He's no doubt found a square hole for his gifts and skills, because life has a way of making that happen. So it is with all of us.
TV News in a Postmodern World
Convention versus the Internet
March 2005
by Terry Heaton
The only thing worse than a square peg in a round hole is a square peg trying to get into a round hole.
Long ago, in one of my news director jobs, a young man showed up at the small market station and asked to speak with me. In the lobby, I was greeted by a fellow -- tape in hand -- who was just about the strangest looking job candidate I'd ever encountered. He was what Ichabod Crane would've seen when looking in the mirrow -- a neck four sizes too small for his collar, hooked nose, ears perpendicular to his head, and a mangled wad of hair on top.
"I've been traveling the country for the past year," he said, "talking to small market news directors about getting that first on-air reporting job out of college."
I invited him into my office, looked over his resume and tape, and told him the facts of life about working in a business that demands cosmetic perfection. He was stunned. All the way through school and through a yearlong interview process, no one had suggested that he had a face for radio.
He was a square peg trying to get into a round hole.
So it is in the war between convention and the Internet, and there is indeed a war underway. While the conflict is everywhere, the inability to see the real battle lines has created a significant structural barrier as old media companies struggle with infiltrating the new. Convention sees the surface, but the war is underneath. Square peg, meet round hole.
The debate between the mainstream media and the blogosphere is one highly visible example.
Convention believes that what has been will always be, while the Internet shoots from the hip in a blaze of entrepreneurial gunfire. Like a patient father, convention smiles at the imagination of these children, but when the pushing and shoving begins, it steps in with its infinite wisdom and a resounding, "Enough!" In doing so online, however, convention runs the square peg/round hole risk, because the structure here cannot and will not run from the top-down, regardless of who wants to be the father. The rules of convention can backfire badly, and this is precisely what's happening in the unseen nooks and crannies of New Media.
The guardians of convention are the lawyers of the land. Their lifeblood is codified rules that can be manipulated from the top, and whenever circumstances impose barriers to this, new rules are simply created to continue convention. The problem with convention's rules is that they don't apply online, because there is no control mechanism.
When CBS released its Memogate report, they did a smart thing. Along with the story of network action in the wake of the report, CBSNews.com also provided its users access to the entire 234-page report. This was presented in Adobe PDF format, a popular software for transmitting documents for printing. Bloggers and other Internet communicators dislike PDF, because the text in the format isn't easily copied for reproduction in other forms of media, especially those online. Nevertheless, it can be done, but there were still complaints from the blogosphere about the network choice of PDF. These were overshadowed, however, by the fact that CBS had released the entire report.
Bring in the lawyers. Two days later, the PDF file was replaced by one with Digital Rights Management restrictions enabled, which completely prevented copying any of the text electronically. This was a bad move by CBS. It infuriated the blogosphere and further alienated the same people who broke the original story that caused the network so much embarrassment in the first place. The network's lawyers responded that they did it to prevent anybody from making and distributing a bogus copy (or parody) of the document. This was an act of convention trying to wiggle its way into the round hole of the Internet.
From an Internet perspective -- where the law of attraction rules -- the action of the lawyers was almost laughable, but the CBS team of attorneys viewed it as a logical and rational response, because their world is top-down, command and control. Like other Modernist institutions, CBS is addicted to being right, and feeding their addiction has blinded them to what's really taking place in the world around them.
The Achilles' Heel of convention is its insistence that what has been will always be. This is what led New York Times columnist Bill Safire to suggest that bloggers are just waiting to become a part of the mainstream, which is where the money is found.
Blogs will compete with op-ed columns for "views you can use," and the best will morph out of the pajama game to deliver serious analysis and fresh information, someday prospering with ads and subscriptions. The prospect of profit will bring bloggers in from the meanstream to the mainstream center of comment and local news coverage.
The "prospect of profit" can never be a value proposition for the blogosphere, because it would be another square peg looking to get into a round hole. The currency of the blogosphere is passionate involvement and the sense of closure that comes with participation. Citizen journalism's great power is its voluntary involvement in the things that matter to its various denizens. Nothing kills passion like money, and while there certainly may be bloggers who make lots of money, they will then have to morph into the rules of convention and, therefore, lose the street creds earned within the very community in which they used to dwell. This is inevitable, and those who propose a prospering blogging community with ads and subscriptions are fooling themselves.
Convention demands control while the blogosphere rejects it. The disruptive innovations that permit an individual to be his or her own publisher -- whether text or video -- aren't what's fueling the citizen journalism revolution. It's the distribution system, one that has no top or bottom, and wherein audience is determined by the readers/viewers, not by the publisher or network. Moreover, the relationship between blog writer and blog reader is far different than that of editorial writer and newspaper consumer. Why? Because the readers of blogs aren't just reading. They're also judging and thinking and writing and linking. A viable blog doesn't broadcast. It a part of a conversation, and conversation is, well, free.
There's an important discussion underway about whether the Internet is a medium or a place. Convention understands and welcomes the former, but the latter is the actual reality. Cyberspace is still space, and the immutable laws are a little different here. A medium moves content from one place to another, usually outward. A space is where people gather and share the experience. Conversations are two-way in a space. A medium moves messages in one direction. This ads to the square peg/round hole problem.
Despite the arguments of those within the institution of the fourth estate, the role of the so-called "professional" press is the manufacture of consent. This was the dream of its founder, Walter Lippmann, who introduced the idea of an educated and elite class to control the uneducated masses 100 years ago. However, the role of the blogosphere is the deconstruction of that consent, with the resultant hope of establishing a more universal consent at street level. Square peg, meet round hole.
Convention's most dangerous trap is to seduce that which is new. Like the Borg of Star Trek, it boldly proclaims that resistence is futile and that assimilation is the only way. Convention must assimilate or be destroyed and replaced by something else. As Picasso said, "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." That which is being destroyed -- the fatted calf that went before -- doesn't want to let go, but that's exactly what's happening in this brave, new world of ours. This is why people like Mr. Safire, and those who rest comfortably within convention, can see only what has been.
PR guru and blogger, Steve Rubel, wrote of the "rock star" status of some bloggers.
With interest in blogs rising, some bloggers are rapidly becoming celebrities. They're popping up in the press, attracting flocks of followers and, in some cases, even a roster of advertisers. And why not? They deserve it. After all, these "A-listers" can easily sway the opinions of thousands.
This is convention trying to seduce a threat. Steve encourages companies to invest in endorsement deals and the like with bloggers, because it's smart business. Square peg, meet round hole.
In an article called "Blogger Backlash," New York Press writer Russ Smith notes the conflict between the mainstream press and bloggers:
"The bloggers - "citizen journalists," pajama pundits, whatever you want to call them - are reaching millions of Americans, and while many will be co-opted by traditional media companies, it's a kick in the pants and skirts of the Beltway cocktail party crowd, whose precious words and broadcasts don't matter as much anymore."
Note the assumption that bloggers will (of course) be "co-opted by traditional media companies." Assimilation. Resistance is futile.
George Simpson wrote for MediaDailyNews that blogging is a hobby that won't pay the rent, so Rubel's idea of payola to grab extra income is appealing. Simpson sees what's really happening.
One of the things that make blogs appealing is that they have no rules. But no rules mean that they will never escape the shadow of doubt. (Not that having rules stopped payola in any other industry.) So let's not overreact to bloggers and understand that they are subject to the same corruption that infects every other medium. With one tiny exception: they are accountable to no one.
In addressing media companies who are experimenting with citizen journalists, Poynter's Steve Outing writes that the idea of identifying your best citizen journalists and paying them as they continue contributing isn't a bad one. "But perhaps a better idea is to pay frequent contributors with goodies like t-shirts, caps, and coffee mugs -- all emblazoned with the brand name of the website, of course." This is smart, because it doesn't force the assimilation issue. It simply recognizes the contribution of everyday citizens and differentiates them from professional journalists. Once they get paid, they've been assimilated.
When discussing the Internet and the blogosphere with media people who are uninformed, the first question that's usually asked is, "Where's the money?" It's an understandable question, because we're so indoctrinated in the laws of mass marketing that nothing else is real or valuable. The top wants to be shown how the bottom will support its position. But this is the heart of the misunderstanding about the Internet in general and the blogosphere in particular. Certainly, there's money to be made online, but if we approach it only from convention, our minds will be closed to the infinite possibilities it offers.
Broadcasting needs to return to its roots in order to have a successful future, and I'm not talking about the business basics. In its infancy, the industry was driven by an entrepreneurial spirit that brought us innovation after innovation and built a model that lasted for 50 years. But the business rules and concepts that carried the industry are exactly what's killing it today, and the only way out of that is to get back to that entrepreneurial spirit. Invite the right-brainers around you; get out the whiteboards and zero base your company.
I often think of that young man who came to see me so long ago, and I wonder what happened to him. He's no doubt found a square hole for his gifts and skills, because life has a way of making that happen. So it is with all of us.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Again here is the complete issue of 'The Weekly Spin' an excellent source of the hidden news:
THE WEEKLY SPIN, March 23, 2005
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THIS WEEK'S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. CMD & Free Press File 'Fake News' Complaint with FCC on Behalf of 40,000 Petition Signers
2. Stauber Debates Fake News on WBUR's "On Point"
3. PR Execs Undeterred by Fake News "Flap"
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. California Unions Sue to Terminate Video News Releases
2. Rupert Murdoch's Tax Two-Step
3. Nuclear Energy Is the New Black
4. For Ethnic Press, Access Is Separate, Unequal
5. The Age of Missing Information
6. Enron: Patron Saint of Bush's Fake News
7. Sacramento to Hollywood: Back Off
8. Mad Cow: Trade War of Words
9. On Iraq, Not All News Deemed "Fit to Print"
10. Americans Still Believe Bush's War Propaganda
11. Is that Business I Hear Booming?
12. Consumers Buy the Darndest Things
----------------------------------------------------------------------
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. CMD & FREE PRESS FILE 'FAKE NEWS' COMPLAINT WITH FCC ON BEHALF OF 40,000 PETITION SIGNERS
by John Stauber
The Center for Media and Democracy and Free Press have filed a
complaint with the Federal Communications Commission urging an
investigation of the extensive airing of "fake news" by TV
broadcasters who take government and corporate Video News Release
(VNR) stories and run them unlabeled as real journalism. In just one
week nearly 40,000 citizens have signed our petition calling on the
FCC, Congress and local broadcasters to stop fake news.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3414
2. STAUBER DEBATES FAKE NEWS ON WBUR'S "ON POINT"
by John Stauber
I was a guest tonight on WBUR's nationwide call-in public radio
program "On Point." You can hear the show online at the WBUR
website. The topic was the Bush administration's quarter-billion
dollar expenditure on PR and propaganda.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3375
3. PR EXECS UNDETERRED BY FAKE NEWS "FLAP"
by John Stauber
This afternoon I listened in on a conference call among some of the
top PR execs in the business of producing video news releases
(VNRs), more honestly called fake news. I can report they are proud
and confident that the recent "flap" on the front page of Sunday's
New York Times about the Bush administration's use of fake news will
amount to nothing at all. These PR executives are elated that the
New York Times piece was about government propaganda, and not about
their much more widespread and lucrative production of corporate
VNRs, the biggest and richest part of the fake news business.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3374
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. CALIFORNIA UNIONS SUE TO TERMINATE VIDEO NEWS RELEASES
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/22/BAGIIBSQL21.DTL
A lawsuit filed in Sacramento Superior Court by three California
unions seeks a ruling banning public funds from being used for the
production of video news releases. VNRs produced by the
Schwarzenegger administration have backed moves to remove workers'
lunch break guarantees and opposed legislated nurse-to-patient
staffing ratios. A California Health and Human Services Agency
spokeswoman defended the use of VNRs. "There is no statutory
prohibition against the use of public funds to produce video news
releases. ... No court has expressly disapproved the expenditure of
public funds for VNRs," she said.
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, March 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3472
2. RUPERT MURDOCH'S TAX TWO-STEP
http://afr.com/premium/articles/2005/03/22/1111254025160.html
Australian journalist Neil Chenoweth has revealed that Rupert
Murdoch "sidestepped stamp duty of $A53 million [U.S.$41.3m] and
capital gains tax of up to $A1.2 billion [U.S.$936m] by moving
control of his ultimate family company, Kayarem, to the Caribbean
and listing it on the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSE) a week before
News Corporation was reincorporated in the United States last
November. Documents filed with the BSE show that listing Kayarem in
the tax haven allowed the Murdoch family to obtain a tax benefit
when it sold its controlling interest in the Queensland Press group
to News Corp." In 2001, Chenoweth's book Virtual Murdoch was
published in the UK and as Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the
World's Greatest Media Wizard in the U.S. in November 2002.
SOURCE: Australian Financial Review, March 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3471
3. NUCLEAR ENERGY IS THE NEW BLACK
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30032/story.htm
At a conference on the future of nuclear power, International Atomic
Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei "pointed to nuclear energy
policy plans in China, Finland, the United States and possibly
Poland as proof that nuclear power may be returning to vogue." U.S.
Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said, "America hasn't ordered a new
nuclear power plant since the 1970s and it's time to start building
again." Recently released "internal Energy Department email
messages" suggest that some work done "in preparation for seeking a
license to open a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in
Nevada" was falsified. A department spokesperson said the discovery
was a positive sign of "quality-assurance procedures." Our next
issue of PR Watch focuses on the nuclear industry - if you're not
already subscribed, sign up today!
SOURCE: Reuters, March 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3415
4. FOR ETHNIC PRESS, ACCESS IS SEPARATE, UNEQUAL
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846210
Government agencies "often don't return phone calls or provide
relevant information" to the ethnic press, according to a survey by
the Independent Press Association-New York. The association is a
network of 115 "immigrant, African-American, and community
newspapers." The most unhelpful federal agencies were the Department
of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Affairs, and the Department of Labor. Unhelpful New York City
agencies included the police, fire department, mayor's office and
Department of Education. The survey found that "timely delivery of
information from government agencies" to ethnic media reporters
occurs just half of the time.
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3413
5. THE AGE OF MISSING INFORMATION
http://www.slate.com/id/2114963/
Since President Bush entered office, there has been a 75% increase
in the amount of government information classified as secret each
year. "Yet an even more aggressive form of government information
control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush
era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified
information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official
databases," writes Steven Aftergood, director of the project on
government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Once
freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred
to the public as 'sensitive but unclassified' or 'for official use
only.'" Examples of unclassified but unavailable information include
the Defense Department's telephone directory, the National Archives'
historical records, satellite orbital information, aeronautical
maps, and environmental data.
SOURCE: Slate, March 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3412
6. ENRON: PATRON SAINT OF BUSH'S FAKE NEWS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/arts/20Rich.html
Former [[sw:Enron]] CEO [[sw:Ken Lay]], "the poster boy for how big
guys can rip off suckers in the stock market," is back in the news
as his trial date nears. According to Frank Rich, "The enduring
legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a
corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose
source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived,
unquestioned, for years." How? "Enron 'was fixated on its public
relations campaigns.' It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a
Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune
reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many)." Rich also
writes about Susan Molinari, who "is invariably described as 'a
former Republican Congresswoman' or a CNBC political analyst'" on
news shows. But her current jobs are "C.E.O. of the Washington
Group, Ketchum's lobbying firm, and president of Ketchum Public
Affairs" - the same Ketchum responsible for Armstrong Williams and
video news releases narrated by faux reporter Karen Ryan.
SOURCE: New York Times, March 20, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3411
7. SACRAMENTO TO HOLLYWOOD: BACK OFF
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/03/18/state/n160412S35.DTL
"We believe a court would find the 'style, tenor and timing' of the
(video news release) to be 'promotional' in nature, thus triggering
the requirement it be expressly authorized by statute," ruled the
California state legislature's counsel, on a Schwarzenegger
administration VNR. The undersecretary of the Labor and Workforce
Development Agency, which produced the VNR to support changes in
workers' break guarantees, earlier said that "the administration's
lawyers concluded the videos were permissible." The Schwarzenegger
administration made at least four VNRs without legislative
authorization. In national news, the Federal Communications
Commission has been asked by Senators John Kerry and Daniel Inouye
(both Democrats) to investigate the broadcasting of
government-funded VNRs.
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3409
8. MAD COW: TRADE WAR OF WORDS
http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/0317fh_canada_beef.htm
Ongoing litigation to keep the U.S. border closed to Canadian beef
and cattle, following three cases of mad cow disease there, has
prompted renewed PR efforts. The Alberta Beef Producers hired
Fleishman-Hillard, to help "reopen the U.S. market to Canadian
beef." The Montana-based group R-CALF, which filed the lawsuit,
"purchased a half-page advertisement in the Washington Post ...
thanking the U.S. Senate for passing a resolution blocking the
resumption of live cattle and full beef trade with Canada." And the
Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food Ministry is helping "launch an
aggressive marketing campaign to reclaim and expand markets for
Canadian beef," part of the country's "Repositioning the Livestock
Industry Strategy," launched last year.
SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily (reg. req'd.), March 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3398
9. ON IRAQ, NOT ALL NEWS DEEMED "FIT TO PRINT"
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846234
"Many media outlets self-censored their reporting on Iraq," often
out of fear of offending their audience, found a survey of more than
200 U.S. media personnel by American University's School of
Communications. The "editing that went into content after it was
gathered but before it was published" was significant. 15% of those
reporting from Iraq said "they did not believe the final version" of
their pieces, post-editing, "accurately represented the story." 20%
of those reporting on Iraq from the U.S. "said material was edited
for reasons other than basic style and length." One survey
respondent wrote, "The real damage of war on the civilian population
was uniformly omitted." In contrast, 92% said they had "no limits at
all" on "the type of interviews conducted."
SOURCE: Editor & Publisher, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3377
10. AMERICANS STILL BELIEVE BUSH'S WAR PROPAGANDA
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/story?id=582744
This weekend is the second anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq.
The latest ABC News and Washington Post poll of public opinion shows
that most Americans still believe, incorrectly of course, that
Saddam's Iraq supported the 9/11 terrorists and had weapons of mass
destruction. Interestingly, the poll's own analysis tries to
downplay the significance of its findings, saying, "Most Americans
favored overthrowing Saddam years earlier, long before al Qaeda
became broadly known." Oh really? As we document in Weapons of Mass
Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, the war
could never have been sold to the American people had ABC, the
Washington Post, and the rest of the mainstream media done their job
of exposing the false claims of the Bush administration. Instead,
they echoed those claims and censored and ignored critics of the
war.
SOURCE: ABC News, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3376
11. IS THAT BUSINESS I HEAR BOOMING?
http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/0316iraqex.htm
Iraqex, the U.S.-owned "investment group set up to pursue business
in Iraq," has changed its name to Lincoln Group, after its holding
company, Lincoln Alliance Corporation. Lincoln Group has a $6
million, 3-year PR contract for the U.S.-led Multi-National
Corps-Iraq, for which it "develops video, audio and print products
to support MNC-I initiatives." It also publishes Iraq Business
Journal, a "monthly publication on contract opportunities, life in
Iraq and classifieds." The publication recently interviewed Grand
Ayatolla Ali Al-Sistani, who said foreign investment is acceptable,
as long as the investor is not with the "occupation forces" or
taking "advantage of any instability." Lincoln Group is still
looking for interns.
SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily (reg. req'd.), March 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3373
12. CONSUMERS BUY THE DARNDEST THINGS
http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Business/031605.html
Afraid that their vote to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
to oil exploration might make Congress more likely to increase fuel
efficiency standards, the automobile industry is "trying to polish
its image." The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is claiming, in
newspaper and radio ads, and on cleaning sponges given to
Congressional staffers, that "cars are 99% cleaner than they used to
be." (The Union of Concerned Scientists calls the Auto Alliance
campaign "highly misleading.") An Auto Alliance spokesperson said
increased fuel standards would be "very difficult to achieve,"
because of the popularity of large vehicles. "It's not what we
manufacture; it's what consumers buy," she said.
SOURCE: The Hill, March 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3372
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Weekly Spin is compiled by staff and volunteers at the
Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a nonprofit public
interest organization. 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 Center website:
http://www.prwatch.org/spin/index.html
Archives of our quarterly publication, PR Watch, are at:
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues
CMD also sponsors SourceWatch, a collaborative research
project that invites anyone (including you) to contribute
and edit articles:
http://www.sourcewatch.org
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
Contributions to the Center for Media and Democracy
are tax-deductible. Send checks to:
CMD
520 University Ave. #227
Madison, WI 53703
To donate now online, visit:
https://www.egrants.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2344-0|1118-0
_______________________________________________
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Weekly-Spin@prwatch.org
http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/weekly-spin
THE WEEKLY SPIN, March 23, 2005
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http://www.prwatch.org
To support our work now online visit:
https://www.egrants.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2344-0|1118-0
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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
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THIS WEEK'S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. CMD & Free Press File 'Fake News' Complaint with FCC on Behalf of 40,000 Petition Signers
2. Stauber Debates Fake News on WBUR's "On Point"
3. PR Execs Undeterred by Fake News "Flap"
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. California Unions Sue to Terminate Video News Releases
2. Rupert Murdoch's Tax Two-Step
3. Nuclear Energy Is the New Black
4. For Ethnic Press, Access Is Separate, Unequal
5. The Age of Missing Information
6. Enron: Patron Saint of Bush's Fake News
7. Sacramento to Hollywood: Back Off
8. Mad Cow: Trade War of Words
9. On Iraq, Not All News Deemed "Fit to Print"
10. Americans Still Believe Bush's War Propaganda
11. Is that Business I Hear Booming?
12. Consumers Buy the Darndest Things
----------------------------------------------------------------------
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. CMD & FREE PRESS FILE 'FAKE NEWS' COMPLAINT WITH FCC ON BEHALF OF 40,000 PETITION SIGNERS
by John Stauber
The Center for Media and Democracy and Free Press have filed a
complaint with the Federal Communications Commission urging an
investigation of the extensive airing of "fake news" by TV
broadcasters who take government and corporate Video News Release
(VNR) stories and run them unlabeled as real journalism. In just one
week nearly 40,000 citizens have signed our petition calling on the
FCC, Congress and local broadcasters to stop fake news.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3414
2. STAUBER DEBATES FAKE NEWS ON WBUR'S "ON POINT"
by John Stauber
I was a guest tonight on WBUR's nationwide call-in public radio
program "On Point." You can hear the show online at the WBUR
website. The topic was the Bush administration's quarter-billion
dollar expenditure on PR and propaganda.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3375
3. PR EXECS UNDETERRED BY FAKE NEWS "FLAP"
by John Stauber
This afternoon I listened in on a conference call among some of the
top PR execs in the business of producing video news releases
(VNRs), more honestly called fake news. I can report they are proud
and confident that the recent "flap" on the front page of Sunday's
New York Times about the Bush administration's use of fake news will
amount to nothing at all. These PR executives are elated that the
New York Times piece was about government propaganda, and not about
their much more widespread and lucrative production of corporate
VNRs, the biggest and richest part of the fake news business.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3374
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. CALIFORNIA UNIONS SUE TO TERMINATE VIDEO NEWS RELEASES
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/22/BAGIIBSQL21.DTL
A lawsuit filed in Sacramento Superior Court by three California
unions seeks a ruling banning public funds from being used for the
production of video news releases. VNRs produced by the
Schwarzenegger administration have backed moves to remove workers'
lunch break guarantees and opposed legislated nurse-to-patient
staffing ratios. A California Health and Human Services Agency
spokeswoman defended the use of VNRs. "There is no statutory
prohibition against the use of public funds to produce video news
releases. ... No court has expressly disapproved the expenditure of
public funds for VNRs," she said.
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, March 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3472
2. RUPERT MURDOCH'S TAX TWO-STEP
http://afr.com/premium/articles/2005/03/22/1111254025160.html
Australian journalist Neil Chenoweth has revealed that Rupert
Murdoch "sidestepped stamp duty of $A53 million [U.S.$41.3m] and
capital gains tax of up to $A1.2 billion [U.S.$936m] by moving
control of his ultimate family company, Kayarem, to the Caribbean
and listing it on the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSE) a week before
News Corporation was reincorporated in the United States last
November. Documents filed with the BSE show that listing Kayarem in
the tax haven allowed the Murdoch family to obtain a tax benefit
when it sold its controlling interest in the Queensland Press group
to News Corp." In 2001, Chenoweth's book Virtual Murdoch was
published in the UK and as Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the
World's Greatest Media Wizard in the U.S. in November 2002.
SOURCE: Australian Financial Review, March 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3471
3. NUCLEAR ENERGY IS THE NEW BLACK
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30032/story.htm
At a conference on the future of nuclear power, International Atomic
Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei "pointed to nuclear energy
policy plans in China, Finland, the United States and possibly
Poland as proof that nuclear power may be returning to vogue." U.S.
Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said, "America hasn't ordered a new
nuclear power plant since the 1970s and it's time to start building
again." Recently released "internal Energy Department email
messages" suggest that some work done "in preparation for seeking a
license to open a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in
Nevada" was falsified. A department spokesperson said the discovery
was a positive sign of "quality-assurance procedures." Our next
issue of PR Watch focuses on the nuclear industry - if you're not
already subscribed, sign up today!
SOURCE: Reuters, March 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3415
4. FOR ETHNIC PRESS, ACCESS IS SEPARATE, UNEQUAL
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846210
Government agencies "often don't return phone calls or provide
relevant information" to the ethnic press, according to a survey by
the Independent Press Association-New York. The association is a
network of 115 "immigrant, African-American, and community
newspapers." The most unhelpful federal agencies were the Department
of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Affairs, and the Department of Labor. Unhelpful New York City
agencies included the police, fire department, mayor's office and
Department of Education. The survey found that "timely delivery of
information from government agencies" to ethnic media reporters
occurs just half of the time.
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3413
5. THE AGE OF MISSING INFORMATION
http://www.slate.com/id/2114963/
Since President Bush entered office, there has been a 75% increase
in the amount of government information classified as secret each
year. "Yet an even more aggressive form of government information
control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush
era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified
information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official
databases," writes Steven Aftergood, director of the project on
government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Once
freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred
to the public as 'sensitive but unclassified' or 'for official use
only.'" Examples of unclassified but unavailable information include
the Defense Department's telephone directory, the National Archives'
historical records, satellite orbital information, aeronautical
maps, and environmental data.
SOURCE: Slate, March 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3412
6. ENRON: PATRON SAINT OF BUSH'S FAKE NEWS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/arts/20Rich.html
Former [[sw:Enron]] CEO [[sw:Ken Lay]], "the poster boy for how big
guys can rip off suckers in the stock market," is back in the news
as his trial date nears. According to Frank Rich, "The enduring
legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a
corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose
source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived,
unquestioned, for years." How? "Enron 'was fixated on its public
relations campaigns.' It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a
Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune
reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many)." Rich also
writes about Susan Molinari, who "is invariably described as 'a
former Republican Congresswoman' or a CNBC political analyst'" on
news shows. But her current jobs are "C.E.O. of the Washington
Group, Ketchum's lobbying firm, and president of Ketchum Public
Affairs" - the same Ketchum responsible for Armstrong Williams and
video news releases narrated by faux reporter Karen Ryan.
SOURCE: New York Times, March 20, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3411
7. SACRAMENTO TO HOLLYWOOD: BACK OFF
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/03/18/state/n160412S35.DTL
"We believe a court would find the 'style, tenor and timing' of the
(video news release) to be 'promotional' in nature, thus triggering
the requirement it be expressly authorized by statute," ruled the
California state legislature's counsel, on a Schwarzenegger
administration VNR. The undersecretary of the Labor and Workforce
Development Agency, which produced the VNR to support changes in
workers' break guarantees, earlier said that "the administration's
lawyers concluded the videos were permissible." The Schwarzenegger
administration made at least four VNRs without legislative
authorization. In national news, the Federal Communications
Commission has been asked by Senators John Kerry and Daniel Inouye
(both Democrats) to investigate the broadcasting of
government-funded VNRs.
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3409
8. MAD COW: TRADE WAR OF WORDS
http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/0317fh_canada_beef.htm
Ongoing litigation to keep the U.S. border closed to Canadian beef
and cattle, following three cases of mad cow disease there, has
prompted renewed PR efforts. The Alberta Beef Producers hired
Fleishman-Hillard, to help "reopen the U.S. market to Canadian
beef." The Montana-based group R-CALF, which filed the lawsuit,
"purchased a half-page advertisement in the Washington Post ...
thanking the U.S. Senate for passing a resolution blocking the
resumption of live cattle and full beef trade with Canada." And the
Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food Ministry is helping "launch an
aggressive marketing campaign to reclaim and expand markets for
Canadian beef," part of the country's "Repositioning the Livestock
Industry Strategy," launched last year.
SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily (reg. req'd.), March 17, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3398
9. ON IRAQ, NOT ALL NEWS DEEMED "FIT TO PRINT"
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846234
"Many media outlets self-censored their reporting on Iraq," often
out of fear of offending their audience, found a survey of more than
200 U.S. media personnel by American University's School of
Communications. The "editing that went into content after it was
gathered but before it was published" was significant. 15% of those
reporting from Iraq said "they did not believe the final version" of
their pieces, post-editing, "accurately represented the story." 20%
of those reporting on Iraq from the U.S. "said material was edited
for reasons other than basic style and length." One survey
respondent wrote, "The real damage of war on the civilian population
was uniformly omitted." In contrast, 92% said they had "no limits at
all" on "the type of interviews conducted."
SOURCE: Editor & Publisher, March 18, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3377
10. AMERICANS STILL BELIEVE BUSH'S WAR PROPAGANDA
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/story?id=582744
This weekend is the second anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq.
The latest ABC News and Washington Post poll of public opinion shows
that most Americans still believe, incorrectly of course, that
Saddam's Iraq supported the 9/11 terrorists and had weapons of mass
destruction. Interestingly, the poll's own analysis tries to
downplay the significance of its findings, saying, "Most Americans
favored overthrowing Saddam years earlier, long before al Qaeda
became broadly known." Oh really? As we document in Weapons of Mass
Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, the war
could never have been sold to the American people had ABC, the
Washington Post, and the rest of the mainstream media done their job
of exposing the false claims of the Bush administration. Instead,
they echoed those claims and censored and ignored critics of the
war.
SOURCE: ABC News, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3376
11. IS THAT BUSINESS I HEAR BOOMING?
http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/0316iraqex.htm
Iraqex, the U.S.-owned "investment group set up to pursue business
in Iraq," has changed its name to Lincoln Group, after its holding
company, Lincoln Alliance Corporation. Lincoln Group has a $6
million, 3-year PR contract for the U.S.-led Multi-National
Corps-Iraq, for which it "develops video, audio and print products
to support MNC-I initiatives." It also publishes Iraq Business
Journal, a "monthly publication on contract opportunities, life in
Iraq and classifieds." The publication recently interviewed Grand
Ayatolla Ali Al-Sistani, who said foreign investment is acceptable,
as long as the investor is not with the "occupation forces" or
taking "advantage of any instability." Lincoln Group is still
looking for interns.
SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily (reg. req'd.), March 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3373
12. CONSUMERS BUY THE DARNDEST THINGS
http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Business/031605.html
Afraid that their vote to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
to oil exploration might make Congress more likely to increase fuel
efficiency standards, the automobile industry is "trying to polish
its image." The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is claiming, in
newspaper and radio ads, and on cleaning sponges given to
Congressional staffers, that "cars are 99% cleaner than they used to
be." (The Union of Concerned Scientists calls the Auto Alliance
campaign "highly misleading.") An Auto Alliance spokesperson said
increased fuel standards would be "very difficult to achieve,"
because of the popularity of large vehicles. "It's not what we
manufacture; it's what consumers buy," she said.
SOURCE: The Hill, March 16, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3372
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Weekly Spin is compiled by staff and volunteers at the
Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a nonprofit public
interest organization. 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 Center website:
http://www.prwatch.org/spin/index.html
Archives of our quarterly publication, PR Watch, are at:
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues
CMD also sponsors SourceWatch, a collaborative research
project that invites anyone (including you) to contribute
and edit articles:
http://www.sourcewatch.org
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
Contributions to the Center for Media and Democracy
are tax-deductible. Send checks to:
CMD
520 University Ave. #227
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@prwatch.org
http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/weekly-spin
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
The following is a weekly news letter that explains it self. They report on the dangers of bad journalism and you should be aware of this kind of spin and who is behind it.
THE WEEKLY SPIN, March 16, 2005
---------------------------------------------------------------------
sponsored by the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy
http://www.prwatch.org
To support our work now online visit:
https://www.egrants.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2344-0|1118-0
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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
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---------------------------------------------------------------------
THIS WEEK'S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. WANTED: 250,000 Americans to Fight Fake News & Government Propaganda
2. Desperately Seeking Disclosure: What Happens When Public Funds Go To Private PR Firms?
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Investing in "Ethical" Uranium
2. Gloom in the Ranks of PR
3. Not So "Firewall," After All
4. Where the Buffalo Shills Roam
5. Video News Responses
6. State of the Fourth Estate
7. Ten Minutes from Normal Relations
8. Fake News on the BBC
9. The New York Times Catches on to VNRs
10. Pro-Cedar, Anti-Syria
11. Still in the Movie Business
12. McPositioning
13. Counting Votes First, Dead Later
14. The Reverse British Invasion
----------------------------------------------------------------------
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. WANTED: 250,000 AMERICANS TO FIGHT FAKE NEWS & GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA
by John Stauber
The Center for Media and Democracy is working with Free Press to
gather a quarter million signatures on our petition mobilizing the
American public to fight fake news and government propaganda. On
Sunday, the New York Times reported that at least 20 federal
agencies have made and distributed pre-packaged, ready-to-serve
television news segments to promote President Bush's policies and
initiatives. Congress' Government Accountability Office determined
that these "video news releases" were illegal "covert propaganda"
and told federal agencies to stop. But last Friday, the White House
ordered all agencies to disregard Congress' directive. The Bush
administration is using hundreds of millions of your tax dollars to
manipulate public opinion. Here's how to stop them.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3365
2. DESPERATELY SEEKING DISCLOSURE: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PUBLIC FUNDS GO TO PRIVATE PR FIRMS?
by Diane Farsetta
In some ways, Armstrong Williams got a bad rap.
The conservative Black commentator, who was paid $240,000 by
the U.S. Department of Education to advertise and advocate for the
controversial "No Child Left Behind" law, lost his syndicated
newspaper column and was pilloried for not disclosing the payment.
Williams seriously betrayed the public trust. But he was a
small fry â?? a subcontractor on the $1 million deal between the
Education Department and Ketchum, one of the world's largest public
relations agencies.
At first, Ketchum refused to talk to reporters. Then they
blamed Williams. "We would assume that the commentator/pundit would
disclose," senior partner Lorraine Thelian said. Nearly two weeks
later, Ketchum announced "a new policy for the signing and
authorization of contracts with spokespeople," and requirements for
subcontractors "to abide by the agencyâ??s ethical standards." Not
the most confidence-inspiring response, especially given its
vagueness.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3348
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. INVESTING IN "ETHICAL" URANIUM
http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=afr&kw=Sustainable+Asset+Management&pb=afr&dt=selectRange&dr=toda
Mining giant BHP-Billiton's proposed acquisition of WMC Resources, a
major uranium mining company, poses no problem for the global
ethical investment fund Sustainable Asset Management (SAM). While
some ethical funds avoid both BHP-Billiton shares, following the Ok
Tedi environmental disaster in Papua New Guinea, and WMC shares, due
to its uranium project, SAM holds both. SAM's research manager,
Francis Grey, explained that while they don't agree with uranium or
nuclear power, company projects owned before 1994 do not affect
SAM's "ethical" rating system. "We have an expression of BS, meaning
before sustainability, a time when it was a different world and they
did all sorts of different things," he said. A few years ago, SAM
angered tobacco control activists by including British American
Tobacco in their "ethical" fund index.
SOURCE: Australian Financial Review, March 16, 2005. (sub req'd)
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3371
2. GLOOM IN THE RANKS OF PR
http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/
After last Sunday's New York Times article on video news releases,
Richard Edelman, the president and CEO of the PR company Edelman,
wrote that the PR industry can expect more criticisms. "Why am I so
sure of this? In part, because we have allowed our profession to be
increasing defined as complicit in a cover-up, as willing shills who
let money overwhelm our judgment and moral compass. We are accused
of foisting government propaganda on the American people, in direct
violation of the law," he wrote. Among his suggestions were that the
"reporter" in VNRs ask "a few difficult questions." "How about
identifying the former reporter as such, or including a note to
viewers on-screen that the VNR came from the US Government?" he
suggested. As for corporate VNRs, Edelman remained mute.
SOURCE: Richard Edelman's Speak Up blog, March 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3370
3. NOT SO "FIREWALL," AFTER ALL
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29941/story.htm
"We believe FDA is overstating industry's compliance with the animal
feed ban and understating the potential risk of (mad cow disease)
for U.S. cattle in its reports to Congress and the American people,"
the Government Accountability Office concluded, in a report on the
Food and Drug Administration's management of what government press
releases refer to as the "firewall feed ban." The feed ban is "the
most important U.S. safeguard against mad cow disease." The GAO
report also took issue with FDA's claim of 99% industry compliance
with the ban. That figure is "based on inspections of only about 570
firms," "does not include all serious violations," and counts as
"compliant" firms "that lacked written procedures to prevent" ban
violations, states the report.
SOURCE: Reuters, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3369
4. WHERE THE BUFFALO SHILLS ROAM
http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_3622087,00.html
"The University of Colorado's governing Board of Regents has
retained a $350-per-hour public relations consultant," to deal "with
the fallout from a football recruiting scandal and the ongoing saga
surrounding controversial professor Ward Churchill." The consultant
is Christopher Simpson, a former Washington Times reporter and press
secretary to Senator Strom Thurmond. Simpson said he will work to
get attention "back focused on the tremendous attributes" of the
university. The new hire is in addition to "a contract with local
public relations firm GBSM," and "the combined salaries of several
people on the university's staff who handle public relations,"
including two associate vice-presidents paid $150,000 each.
SOURCE: Rocky Mountain News, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3368
5. VIDEO NEWS RESPONSES
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&u=/ap/20050314/ap_on_go_pr_wh/government_videos&printer=1
In response to Sunday's New York Times expose, White House press
secretary Scott McClellan called government-produced video news
releases "an informational tool." Their source, he said, is "very
clear to the TV stations." The head of Medialink, one of the largest
VNR companies, said "the government's use of VNRs dates back to the
Eisenhower presidency," adding that the Times "failed to report on
the long history of such government education programs." In a letter
to the Times, the president of West Glen Communications wrote,
"Newspapers don't reveal that much of the news they print originates
from press releases supplied by corporate communications
departments, PR agencies, college sports information offices and
staffs of mayors and legislators." O'Dwyer's summed up VNR
producers' reactions as saying the Times piece was "old" and
"politics-ridden."
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3367
6. STATE OF THE FOURTH ESTATE
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000837511
The Project for Excellence in Journalism's "State of the News Media
2005" concludes that U.S. media coverage of Iraq was balanced, that
campaign coverage favored John Kerry, and that Fox was "the most
one-sided of all major news outlets." On Iraq, 25% of 2,000 stories
analyzed were negative and 20% were positive. "Fox News Channel was
twice as likely to be positive than negative, while CNN and MSNBC
were evenhanded." A "more limited analysis of campaign coverage
found that Bush received more negative, and less positive, coverage
than Kerry," perhaps due to setbacks in Iraq and Bush's incumbent
status. Also, "with the exception of Republicans who prefer Fox
News," American's don't seek out news sources that reinforce their
beliefs.
SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, March 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3366
7. TEN MINUTES FROM NORMAL RELATIONS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25347-2005Mar10.html
Former White House counselor and Bush campaign advisor Karen Hughes
"will take over the Bush administration's troubled public diplomacy
effort intended to burnish the U.S. image abroad, particularly in
the Muslim world." The Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and
Public Affairs position at the State Department, previously held by
Margaret Tutwiler and Charlotte Beers, uses "exchange programs,
foreign language media and other initiatives ... to promote American
values" while "combating negative images." Hughes will be assisted
by Dina Powell, the current White House Chief of Personnel and "an
American of Egyptian descent who speaks fluent Arabic."
SOURCE: Washington Post, March 12, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3364
8. FAKE NEWS ON THE BBC
http://spinwatch.server101.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=342
"We have our very own fake journalists operating in the UK," writes
David Miller of Europe's SpinWatch. Miller cites the British Forces
Broadcasting Service, whose reports have been aired by the BBC. BFBS
is run by the Services Sound and Vision Corporation, an entity
"fully funded by the Ministry of Defence," which brags about its
"considerable contribution" to the armed forces' morale. BBC
Scotland insiders, Miller writes, "are livid" about the BFBS pieces,
calling them "an audio press release for the Army." Other members of
the British "network of propaganda agencies" are the London Press
Service, run by Intelfax for the government's Foreign Office, and
British Satellite News, run by the international communications
company World Television.
SOURCE: SpinWatch, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3363
9. THE NEW YORK TIMES CATCHES ON TO VNRS
http://nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html
New York Times reporters David Barstow and Robin Stein have written
a lengthy report on the use of video news releases as covert
propaganda. "Under the Bush administration," they write, "the
federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of
public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that
major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch
everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at
least 20 federal agencies ... have made and distributed hundreds of
television news segments in the past four years, records and
interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations
across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's
role." VNRs are produced for the government by private contractors
and the State Department's Office of Broadcasting Services, the
Agriculture Department's Broadcast Media and Technology Center, and
the Defense Department's Pentagon Channel, among others. We've been
criticizing VNRs used as propaganda for more than a decade. For
example, our 1995 book Toxic Sludge Is Good For You described how
VNRs were used to sell the first Bush administration's Persian Gulf
war. It's nice to see the Times starting to notice.
SOURCE: New York Times, March 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3362
10. PRO-CEDAR, ANTI-SYRIA
http://prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=236397&site=3
The Lebanese American Council for Democracy, the "group that played
a key role in the passage of the Syrian Accountability Act,"
retained 5W Public Relations for "strategic counsel and media
relations." The group's goal is "to gain support from U.S. political
leaders and United Nations officials to pressure Syria to withdraw
its troops." The group is reportedly "closely aligned with Michel
Aoun, the former Prime Minister who was ousted by the Syrians" in
1990. The 5W firm is "preparing daily briefing sheets for the media
to respond to current events." The Syrian Accountability Act, passed
in 2003, "imposed sanctions on Syria for occupying Lebanon."
SOURCE: PR Week (reg. req'd.), March 10, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3361
11. STILL IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-video10mar10,0,7563065.story?coll=la
In California, more video news releases produced by the
Schwarzenegger administration have been identified. The VNRs tout
administration proposals to reduce nursing staff levels in
hospitals, to make teachers' pay merit-based, to make tenure more
stringent, to lower prescription drug prices, and to end mandatory
employee rest breaks. Schwarzenegger's spokesperson called the VNRs
"just a press release in video form." But the VNRs push
controversial proposals, as opposed to those by the Gray Davis
administration, which explained new driver's licenses or celebrated
Labor Day. PR Week reports that California "has launched an effort
to make VNR production easier for all government departments," by
hiring a multimedia communications specialist.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3360
12. MCPOSITIONING
http://www.suntimes.com/output/lazare/cst-fin-lew10.html
A new round of global television advertisements developed for
McDonaldâ??s by the Leo Burnett advertising agency, Chicago
columnist Lewis Lazare writes, are "pushing too hard to position
itself as a health-conscious company, a claim that comes off a bit
disingenuous." Across the Pacific, New Zealand Minister for Health
and former dental nurse Annette King was busy dismissing the
suggestion that having Ronald McDonaldâ??s clown face painted on
vans that deliver dental services to remote communities was helping
McDonaldâ??s marketing and advertising plans.
SOURCE: Chicago Sun Times, March 10, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3359
13. COUNTING VOTES FIRST, DEAD LATER
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/330/7491/550?etoc
Visiting professor of public health epidemiology at Oxford
University, Klim McPherson, notes that while the British government
has criticized estimates that put the number of Iraqi casualties of
the war at 100,000, a defence ministry group has been slow to
produce a better estimate. "Electorates, in Iraq and elsewhere, have
a right to know. To procrastinate further for no good reason is to
devalue public health processes, not to mention Iraqi lives. As
public health professionals we need to know the health costs," he
wrote.
SOURCE: British Medical Journal, March 12, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3358
14. THE REVERSE BRITISH INVASION
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1431306,00.html
The global warming "denial lobby" is targeting Britain, reports the
Observer, and it has U.S. connections. "The UK-based Scientific
Alliance, which organised the meeting of skeptics in London last
month, recently published a joint report with America's George C.
Marshall Institute, a think-tank which has received donations from
Exxon. ... Exxon has also contributed $50,000 to the International
Policy Network, headquartered in London. Key personnel at the IPN
have connections with the Institute of Economic Affairs, Britain's
leading conservative think-tank, as well as the Competitive
Enterprise Institute in the U.S., whose global warming expert is
Myron Ebell, President Bush's climate adviser."
SOURCE: Observer, March 6, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3357
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Weekly Spin is compiled by staff and volunteers at the
Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a nonprofit public
interest organization. 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 Center website:
http://www.prwatch.org/spin/index.html
Archives of our quarterly publication, PR Watch, are at:
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues
CMD also sponsors SourceWatch, a collaborative research
project that invites anyone (including you) to contribute
and edit articles:
http://www.sourcewatch.org
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
Contributions to the Center for Media and Democracy
are tax-deductible. Send checks to:
CMD
520 University Ave. #227
Madison, WI 53703
To donate now online, visit:
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THE WEEKLY SPIN, March 16, 2005
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THIS WEEK'S NEWS
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. WANTED: 250,000 Americans to Fight Fake News & Government Propaganda
2. Desperately Seeking Disclosure: What Happens When Public Funds Go To Private PR Firms?
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Investing in "Ethical" Uranium
2. Gloom in the Ranks of PR
3. Not So "Firewall," After All
4. Where the Buffalo Shills Roam
5. Video News Responses
6. State of the Fourth Estate
7. Ten Minutes from Normal Relations
8. Fake News on the BBC
9. The New York Times Catches on to VNRs
10. Pro-Cedar, Anti-Syria
11. Still in the Movie Business
12. McPositioning
13. Counting Votes First, Dead Later
14. The Reverse British Invasion
----------------------------------------------------------------------
== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. WANTED: 250,000 AMERICANS TO FIGHT FAKE NEWS & GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA
by John Stauber
The Center for Media and Democracy is working with Free Press to
gather a quarter million signatures on our petition mobilizing the
American public to fight fake news and government propaganda. On
Sunday, the New York Times reported that at least 20 federal
agencies have made and distributed pre-packaged, ready-to-serve
television news segments to promote President Bush's policies and
initiatives. Congress' Government Accountability Office determined
that these "video news releases" were illegal "covert propaganda"
and told federal agencies to stop. But last Friday, the White House
ordered all agencies to disregard Congress' directive. The Bush
administration is using hundreds of millions of your tax dollars to
manipulate public opinion. Here's how to stop them.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3365
2. DESPERATELY SEEKING DISCLOSURE: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PUBLIC FUNDS GO TO PRIVATE PR FIRMS?
by Diane Farsetta
In some ways, Armstrong Williams got a bad rap.
The conservative Black commentator, who was paid $240,000 by
the U.S. Department of Education to advertise and advocate for the
controversial "No Child Left Behind" law, lost his syndicated
newspaper column and was pilloried for not disclosing the payment.
Williams seriously betrayed the public trust. But he was a
small fry â?? a subcontractor on the $1 million deal between the
Education Department and Ketchum, one of the world's largest public
relations agencies.
At first, Ketchum refused to talk to reporters. Then they
blamed Williams. "We would assume that the commentator/pundit would
disclose," senior partner Lorraine Thelian said. Nearly two weeks
later, Ketchum announced "a new policy for the signing and
authorization of contracts with spokespeople," and requirements for
subcontractors "to abide by the agencyâ??s ethical standards." Not
the most confidence-inspiring response, especially given its
vagueness.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3348
== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. INVESTING IN "ETHICAL" URANIUM
http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=afr&kw=Sustainable+Asset+Management&pb=afr&dt=selectRange&dr=toda
Mining giant BHP-Billiton's proposed acquisition of WMC Resources, a
major uranium mining company, poses no problem for the global
ethical investment fund Sustainable Asset Management (SAM). While
some ethical funds avoid both BHP-Billiton shares, following the Ok
Tedi environmental disaster in Papua New Guinea, and WMC shares, due
to its uranium project, SAM holds both. SAM's research manager,
Francis Grey, explained that while they don't agree with uranium or
nuclear power, company projects owned before 1994 do not affect
SAM's "ethical" rating system. "We have an expression of BS, meaning
before sustainability, a time when it was a different world and they
did all sorts of different things," he said. A few years ago, SAM
angered tobacco control activists by including British American
Tobacco in their "ethical" fund index.
SOURCE: Australian Financial Review, March 16, 2005. (sub req'd)
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3371
2. GLOOM IN THE RANKS OF PR
http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/
After last Sunday's New York Times article on video news releases,
Richard Edelman, the president and CEO of the PR company Edelman,
wrote that the PR industry can expect more criticisms. "Why am I so
sure of this? In part, because we have allowed our profession to be
increasing defined as complicit in a cover-up, as willing shills who
let money overwhelm our judgment and moral compass. We are accused
of foisting government propaganda on the American people, in direct
violation of the law," he wrote. Among his suggestions were that the
"reporter" in VNRs ask "a few difficult questions." "How about
identifying the former reporter as such, or including a note to
viewers on-screen that the VNR came from the US Government?" he
suggested. As for corporate VNRs, Edelman remained mute.
SOURCE: Richard Edelman's Speak Up blog, March 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3370
3. NOT SO "FIREWALL," AFTER ALL
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29941/story.htm
"We believe FDA is overstating industry's compliance with the animal
feed ban and understating the potential risk of (mad cow disease)
for U.S. cattle in its reports to Congress and the American people,"
the Government Accountability Office concluded, in a report on the
Food and Drug Administration's management of what government press
releases refer to as the "firewall feed ban." The feed ban is "the
most important U.S. safeguard against mad cow disease." The GAO
report also took issue with FDA's claim of 99% industry compliance
with the ban. That figure is "based on inspections of only about 570
firms," "does not include all serious violations," and counts as
"compliant" firms "that lacked written procedures to prevent" ban
violations, states the report.
SOURCE: Reuters, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3369
4. WHERE THE BUFFALO SHILLS ROAM
http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_3622087,00.html
"The University of Colorado's governing Board of Regents has
retained a $350-per-hour public relations consultant," to deal "with
the fallout from a football recruiting scandal and the ongoing saga
surrounding controversial professor Ward Churchill." The consultant
is Christopher Simpson, a former Washington Times reporter and press
secretary to Senator Strom Thurmond. Simpson said he will work to
get attention "back focused on the tremendous attributes" of the
university. The new hire is in addition to "a contract with local
public relations firm GBSM," and "the combined salaries of several
people on the university's staff who handle public relations,"
including two associate vice-presidents paid $150,000 each.
SOURCE: Rocky Mountain News, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3368
5. VIDEO NEWS RESPONSES
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&u=/ap/20050314/ap_on_go_pr_wh/government_videos&printer=1
In response to Sunday's New York Times expose, White House press
secretary Scott McClellan called government-produced video news
releases "an informational tool." Their source, he said, is "very
clear to the TV stations." The head of Medialink, one of the largest
VNR companies, said "the government's use of VNRs dates back to the
Eisenhower presidency," adding that the Times "failed to report on
the long history of such government education programs." In a letter
to the Times, the president of West Glen Communications wrote,
"Newspapers don't reveal that much of the news they print originates
from press releases supplied by corporate communications
departments, PR agencies, college sports information offices and
staffs of mayors and legislators." O'Dwyer's summed up VNR
producers' reactions as saying the Times piece was "old" and
"politics-ridden."
SOURCE: Associated Press, March 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3367
6. STATE OF THE FOURTH ESTATE
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000837511
The Project for Excellence in Journalism's "State of the News Media
2005" concludes that U.S. media coverage of Iraq was balanced, that
campaign coverage favored John Kerry, and that Fox was "the most
one-sided of all major news outlets." On Iraq, 25% of 2,000 stories
analyzed were negative and 20% were positive. "Fox News Channel was
twice as likely to be positive than negative, while CNN and MSNBC
were evenhanded." A "more limited analysis of campaign coverage
found that Bush received more negative, and less positive, coverage
than Kerry," perhaps due to setbacks in Iraq and Bush's incumbent
status. Also, "with the exception of Republicans who prefer Fox
News," American's don't seek out news sources that reinforce their
beliefs.
SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, March 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3366
7. TEN MINUTES FROM NORMAL RELATIONS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25347-2005Mar10.html
Former White House counselor and Bush campaign advisor Karen Hughes
"will take over the Bush administration's troubled public diplomacy
effort intended to burnish the U.S. image abroad, particularly in
the Muslim world." The Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and
Public Affairs position at the State Department, previously held by
Margaret Tutwiler and Charlotte Beers, uses "exchange programs,
foreign language media and other initiatives ... to promote American
values" while "combating negative images." Hughes will be assisted
by Dina Powell, the current White House Chief of Personnel and "an
American of Egyptian descent who speaks fluent Arabic."
SOURCE: Washington Post, March 12, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3364
8. FAKE NEWS ON THE BBC
http://spinwatch.server101.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=342
"We have our very own fake journalists operating in the UK," writes
David Miller of Europe's SpinWatch. Miller cites the British Forces
Broadcasting Service, whose reports have been aired by the BBC. BFBS
is run by the Services Sound and Vision Corporation, an entity
"fully funded by the Ministry of Defence," which brags about its
"considerable contribution" to the armed forces' morale. BBC
Scotland insiders, Miller writes, "are livid" about the BFBS pieces,
calling them "an audio press release for the Army." Other members of
the British "network of propaganda agencies" are the London Press
Service, run by Intelfax for the government's Foreign Office, and
British Satellite News, run by the international communications
company World Television.
SOURCE: SpinWatch, March 15, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3363
9. THE NEW YORK TIMES CATCHES ON TO VNRS
http://nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html
New York Times reporters David Barstow and Robin Stein have written
a lengthy report on the use of video news releases as covert
propaganda. "Under the Bush administration," they write, "the
federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of
public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that
major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch
everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at
least 20 federal agencies ... have made and distributed hundreds of
television news segments in the past four years, records and
interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations
across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's
role." VNRs are produced for the government by private contractors
and the State Department's Office of Broadcasting Services, the
Agriculture Department's Broadcast Media and Technology Center, and
the Defense Department's Pentagon Channel, among others. We've been
criticizing VNRs used as propaganda for more than a decade. For
example, our 1995 book Toxic Sludge Is Good For You described how
VNRs were used to sell the first Bush administration's Persian Gulf
war. It's nice to see the Times starting to notice.
SOURCE: New York Times, March 13, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3362
10. PRO-CEDAR, ANTI-SYRIA
http://prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=236397&site=3
The Lebanese American Council for Democracy, the "group that played
a key role in the passage of the Syrian Accountability Act,"
retained 5W Public Relations for "strategic counsel and media
relations." The group's goal is "to gain support from U.S. political
leaders and United Nations officials to pressure Syria to withdraw
its troops." The group is reportedly "closely aligned with Michel
Aoun, the former Prime Minister who was ousted by the Syrians" in
1990. The 5W firm is "preparing daily briefing sheets for the media
to respond to current events." The Syrian Accountability Act, passed
in 2003, "imposed sanctions on Syria for occupying Lebanon."
SOURCE: PR Week (reg. req'd.), March 10, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3361
11. STILL IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-video10mar10,0,7563065.story?coll=la
In California, more video news releases produced by the
Schwarzenegger administration have been identified. The VNRs tout
administration proposals to reduce nursing staff levels in
hospitals, to make teachers' pay merit-based, to make tenure more
stringent, to lower prescription drug prices, and to end mandatory
employee rest breaks. Schwarzenegger's spokesperson called the VNRs
"just a press release in video form." But the VNRs push
controversial proposals, as opposed to those by the Gray Davis
administration, which explained new driver's licenses or celebrated
Labor Day. PR Week reports that California "has launched an effort
to make VNR production easier for all government departments," by
hiring a multimedia communications specialist.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3360
12. MCPOSITIONING
http://www.suntimes.com/output/lazare/cst-fin-lew10.html
A new round of global television advertisements developed for
McDonaldâ??s by the Leo Burnett advertising agency, Chicago
columnist Lewis Lazare writes, are "pushing too hard to position
itself as a health-conscious company, a claim that comes off a bit
disingenuous." Across the Pacific, New Zealand Minister for Health
and former dental nurse Annette King was busy dismissing the
suggestion that having Ronald McDonaldâ??s clown face painted on
vans that deliver dental services to remote communities was helping
McDonaldâ??s marketing and advertising plans.
SOURCE: Chicago Sun Times, March 10, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3359
13. COUNTING VOTES FIRST, DEAD LATER
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/330/7491/550?etoc
Visiting professor of public health epidemiology at Oxford
University, Klim McPherson, notes that while the British government
has criticized estimates that put the number of Iraqi casualties of
the war at 100,000, a defence ministry group has been slow to
produce a better estimate. "Electorates, in Iraq and elsewhere, have
a right to know. To procrastinate further for no good reason is to
devalue public health processes, not to mention Iraqi lives. As
public health professionals we need to know the health costs," he
wrote.
SOURCE: British Medical Journal, March 12, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3358
14. THE REVERSE BRITISH INVASION
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1431306,00.html
The global warming "denial lobby" is targeting Britain, reports the
Observer, and it has U.S. connections. "The UK-based Scientific
Alliance, which organised the meeting of skeptics in London last
month, recently published a joint report with America's George C.
Marshall Institute, a think-tank which has received donations from
Exxon. ... Exxon has also contributed $50,000 to the International
Policy Network, headquartered in London. Key personnel at the IPN
have connections with the Institute of Economic Affairs, Britain's
leading conservative think-tank, as well as the Competitive
Enterprise Institute in the U.S., whose global warming expert is
Myron Ebell, President Bush's climate adviser."
SOURCE: Observer, March 6, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3357
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Weekly Spin is compiled by staff and volunteers at the
Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a nonprofit public
interest organization. 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 Center website:
http://www.prwatch.org/spin/index.html
Archives of our quarterly publication, PR Watch, are at:
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues
CMD also sponsors SourceWatch, a collaborative research
project that invites anyone (including you) to contribute
and edit articles:
http://www.sourcewatch.org
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
Contributions to the Center for Media and Democracy
are tax-deductible. Send checks to:
CMD
520 University Ave. #227
Madison, WI 53703
To donate now online, visit:
https://www.egrants.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2344-0|1118-0
_______________________________________________
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Thursday, March 10, 2005
From CBC web site
Global media giants fear chill from Toronto web libel suit
Last Updated Wed, 09 Mar 2005 14:37:00 EST
CBC News
TORONTO - A libel lawsuit unfolding in Toronto could restrict how news stories are published around the world, 52 large media companies argued this week.
• INDEPTH: Internet
The lawsuit involves the Washington Post's 1997 coverage of a former United Nations official who was accused of financial and sexual improprieties on the job in West Africa.
Cheickh Bangoura, a native of Ghana who later moved from Kenya to Ontario, filed legal action against the Post in 2000 seeking $9 million Cdn. in damages.
The 46-year-old man's suit said the newspaper was hurting his reputation in his new home because Ontario residents could read the stories in the Post's web-based archives.
The Post has seven paid online subscribers in the province and only one person has ever paid to see the story on the archives, the newspaper says.
Despite that, Bangoura's suit argues that material posted on a website that is viewable in Canada should be seen as having been published in Canada.
Judge rules Ontario can hear case
An Ontario judge ruled last year that the province's court system had jurisdiction to hear the case, sending shock waves through media companies around the world.
CNN, the New York Times, Google, Yahoo, the London Times, the CBC and dozens of other publishers and broadcasters are challenging the judge's decision.
They warn that freedom of expression and the public interest might suffer if people could shop for a country with favourable libel laws anywhere in the world and file suit there to avenge themselves over stories they don't like.
It is harder to win a libel case in the United States, where the Washington Post is published, because it has stronger freedom of expression protections for media companies.
If Bangoura's lawsuit is allowed to proceed, websites would be reluctant to post any controversial story for fear of being forced out of business by a large libel settlement, media lawyers said.
Arguments in the case were heard in the Ontario Court of Appeal Tuesday.
Chief Justice Roy McMurtry and two other judges hearing the challenge have reserved judgment.
Global media giants fear chill from Toronto web libel suit
Last Updated Wed, 09 Mar 2005 14:37:00 EST
CBC News
TORONTO - A libel lawsuit unfolding in Toronto could restrict how news stories are published around the world, 52 large media companies argued this week.
• INDEPTH: Internet
The lawsuit involves the Washington Post's 1997 coverage of a former United Nations official who was accused of financial and sexual improprieties on the job in West Africa.
Cheickh Bangoura, a native of Ghana who later moved from Kenya to Ontario, filed legal action against the Post in 2000 seeking $9 million Cdn. in damages.
The 46-year-old man's suit said the newspaper was hurting his reputation in his new home because Ontario residents could read the stories in the Post's web-based archives.
The Post has seven paid online subscribers in the province and only one person has ever paid to see the story on the archives, the newspaper says.
Despite that, Bangoura's suit argues that material posted on a website that is viewable in Canada should be seen as having been published in Canada.
Judge rules Ontario can hear case
An Ontario judge ruled last year that the province's court system had jurisdiction to hear the case, sending shock waves through media companies around the world.
CNN, the New York Times, Google, Yahoo, the London Times, the CBC and dozens of other publishers and broadcasters are challenging the judge's decision.
They warn that freedom of expression and the public interest might suffer if people could shop for a country with favourable libel laws anywhere in the world and file suit there to avenge themselves over stories they don't like.
It is harder to win a libel case in the United States, where the Washington Post is published, because it has stronger freedom of expression protections for media companies.
If Bangoura's lawsuit is allowed to proceed, websites would be reluctant to post any controversial story for fear of being forced out of business by a large libel settlement, media lawyers said.
Arguments in the case were heard in the Ontario Court of Appeal Tuesday.
Chief Justice Roy McMurtry and two other judges hearing the challenge have reserved judgment.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
The following news items and summary may explain why Bush and Putin are so friendly and so much alike:
February 28, 2005
From Russia With Love
While [Russian President] Putin travels with a contingent of reporters just as Bush does, the Kremlin press pool is a handpicked group of reporters, most of whom work for the state . . .
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
February 25, 2005
The Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
USA Today
Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law
January 7, 2005
. . . and the rest selected for their fidelity to the Kremlin's rules of the game.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
"It was very specifically said [that] we need to be fairer to the Bush Administration or to the Republicans than anybody else in the media would be. But that was always understood there as a sort of a code for “lay off.”
Former Fox News reporter
interviewed in the documentary Outfoxed
2004
Helpful questions are often planted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
Gannon: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like 'sickening,' 'disgusting' and 'reprehensible.' Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?
McClellan: I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often.
White House press conference
May 10, 2004
Unwelcome questions are not allowed.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a "town hall"-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice.
Der Speigel
With a Hush and a Whisper, Bush Drops
Town Hall Meeting with Germans
February 23, 2005
And anyone who gets out of line can get out of the pool.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During last year's election campaign Bush avoided interviews with leading newspapers, such as the Washington Post, but frequently invited reporters from smaller swing state publications to speak with him on Air Force One. Vice-president Dick Cheney took the strategy one step further and banned New York Times reporters from travelling with him.
The Observer
The mole, the US media and a White House coup
February 20, 2005
Television channels air newscasts with fancy graphics but follow scripts approved by the Kremlin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The [Education] Department already has paid Ketchum . . . to produce a video release on the law that was used by some television stations as if it were real news. Other government agencies -- including the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- also have distributed such prepackaged videos, a practice that congressional auditors have described as illegal in some cases.
Washington Post
Administration Paid Commentator
January 8, 2005
The general manager installed at NTV after the Kremlin takeover was later fired when his coverage of the Moscow theater siege in 2002 angered Putin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
CNN's top news executive, Eason Jordan, resigned after a web-fed controversy over comments he made at a conference last month in Davos, Switzerland . . . Jordan drew the ire of mostly right-wing bloggers after he allegedly said that U.S. forces in Iraq targeted journalists on several occasions.
NewsHour
Bloggers and Journalists
February 14, 2005
NTV's most independent remaining hosts, Leonid Parfyonov and Savik Shuster, were taken off the air after the government bristled at their talk shows. Shuster's show was called "Freedom of Speech."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
ABC is canceling Bill Maher's late-night topical talk show, "Politically Incorrect," [which] has been on thin ice since just after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when host Maher was quoted as referring to past United States military actions as "cowardly."
CNN
Maher canceled
May 14, 2002
[MSNBC host Phil Donahue's show] was cancelled despite having the best ratings on the network; this occurred, according to published reports, after a study commissioned by NBC described Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."
Fair and Accuracy in Reporting
MSNBC's Double Standard on Free Speech
March 7, 2003
"People do get fired in American press. They don't get fired by government, however. They get fired by their editors or they get fired by their producers, or they get fired by the owners of a particular outlet or network."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
Newspaper editors at the Texas City (Texas) Sun and the Daily Courier in Grants Pass, Ore., apologized for opinion pieces critical of Bush's leadership in the aftermath of the [9/11] attacks, then fired the writers. "Criticism of our chief executive and those around him needs to be responsible and appropriate," wrote Daily Courier editor Dennis Roler in an editorial.
USA Today
The post-Sept. 11 world is potentially confusing
October 8, 2001
If Bush does not trust the Russian press to get the story of yesterday's news conference right, he can at least go to the Kremlin's own Web site. On it was posted a transcript of the joint news conference. Only all of Bush's statements and answers were deleted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The list of names of countries supporting the U.S.-led military action in Iraq has been removed from the White House Web site. [Also] gone are links to the audio and video of President Bush's statement that "I'm not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden . . .
Washington Post
Those White House Links to Nothing
October 25, 2004
The Kremlin press pool is like so many institutions in Russia that have the trappings of a Western-style pluralistic society but operate under a different set of understandings, part of what analyst Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center calls "the illusion of democracy."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
When conservatives talk of George W. Bush’s “transformational” role in American politics, they are referring to a fundamental change they seek in the U.S. system of government in which the Republican Party will dominate for years to come and power will not really be up for grabs in general elections . . .
This concept also might be called the “Putin-izing” of American politics, where one side’s dominance of media, financial resources and the ability to intimidate opponents is overwhelming – as now exists in Russia under President Vladimir Putin
Robert Parry
Bush & the Rise of 'Managed Democracy'
February 12, 2005
__________________________________
"I've just had a very important and constructive dialogue with my friend . . . We have had, over the past four years, very constructive relations, and that's the way I'm going to keep it for the next four years, as well."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
February 28, 2005
From Russia With Love
While [Russian President] Putin travels with a contingent of reporters just as Bush does, the Kremlin press pool is a handpicked group of reporters, most of whom work for the state . . .
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
February 25, 2005
The Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
USA Today
Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law
January 7, 2005
. . . and the rest selected for their fidelity to the Kremlin's rules of the game.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
"It was very specifically said [that] we need to be fairer to the Bush Administration or to the Republicans than anybody else in the media would be. But that was always understood there as a sort of a code for “lay off.”
Former Fox News reporter
interviewed in the documentary Outfoxed
2004
Helpful questions are often planted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
Gannon: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like 'sickening,' 'disgusting' and 'reprehensible.' Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?
McClellan: I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often.
White House press conference
May 10, 2004
Unwelcome questions are not allowed.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a "town hall"-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice.
Der Speigel
With a Hush and a Whisper, Bush Drops
Town Hall Meeting with Germans
February 23, 2005
And anyone who gets out of line can get out of the pool.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During last year's election campaign Bush avoided interviews with leading newspapers, such as the Washington Post, but frequently invited reporters from smaller swing state publications to speak with him on Air Force One. Vice-president Dick Cheney took the strategy one step further and banned New York Times reporters from travelling with him.
The Observer
The mole, the US media and a White House coup
February 20, 2005
Television channels air newscasts with fancy graphics but follow scripts approved by the Kremlin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The [Education] Department already has paid Ketchum . . . to produce a video release on the law that was used by some television stations as if it were real news. Other government agencies -- including the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- also have distributed such prepackaged videos, a practice that congressional auditors have described as illegal in some cases.
Washington Post
Administration Paid Commentator
January 8, 2005
The general manager installed at NTV after the Kremlin takeover was later fired when his coverage of the Moscow theater siege in 2002 angered Putin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
CNN's top news executive, Eason Jordan, resigned after a web-fed controversy over comments he made at a conference last month in Davos, Switzerland . . . Jordan drew the ire of mostly right-wing bloggers after he allegedly said that U.S. forces in Iraq targeted journalists on several occasions.
NewsHour
Bloggers and Journalists
February 14, 2005
NTV's most independent remaining hosts, Leonid Parfyonov and Savik Shuster, were taken off the air after the government bristled at their talk shows. Shuster's show was called "Freedom of Speech."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
ABC is canceling Bill Maher's late-night topical talk show, "Politically Incorrect," [which] has been on thin ice since just after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when host Maher was quoted as referring to past United States military actions as "cowardly."
CNN
Maher canceled
May 14, 2002
[MSNBC host Phil Donahue's show] was cancelled despite having the best ratings on the network; this occurred, according to published reports, after a study commissioned by NBC described Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."
Fair and Accuracy in Reporting
MSNBC's Double Standard on Free Speech
March 7, 2003
"People do get fired in American press. They don't get fired by government, however. They get fired by their editors or they get fired by their producers, or they get fired by the owners of a particular outlet or network."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
Newspaper editors at the Texas City (Texas) Sun and the Daily Courier in Grants Pass, Ore., apologized for opinion pieces critical of Bush's leadership in the aftermath of the [9/11] attacks, then fired the writers. "Criticism of our chief executive and those around him needs to be responsible and appropriate," wrote Daily Courier editor Dennis Roler in an editorial.
USA Today
The post-Sept. 11 world is potentially confusing
October 8, 2001
If Bush does not trust the Russian press to get the story of yesterday's news conference right, he can at least go to the Kremlin's own Web site. On it was posted a transcript of the joint news conference. Only all of Bush's statements and answers were deleted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The list of names of countries supporting the U.S.-led military action in Iraq has been removed from the White House Web site. [Also] gone are links to the audio and video of President Bush's statement that "I'm not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden . . .
Washington Post
Those White House Links to Nothing
October 25, 2004
The Kremlin press pool is like so many institutions in Russia that have the trappings of a Western-style pluralistic society but operate under a different set of understandings, part of what analyst Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center calls "the illusion of democracy."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
When conservatives talk of George W. Bush’s “transformational” role in American politics, they are referring to a fundamental change they seek in the U.S. system of government in which the Republican Party will dominate for years to come and power will not really be up for grabs in general elections . . .
This concept also might be called the “Putin-izing” of American politics, where one side’s dominance of media, financial resources and the ability to intimidate opponents is overwhelming – as now exists in Russia under President Vladimir Putin
Robert Parry
Bush & the Rise of 'Managed Democracy'
February 12, 2005
__________________________________
"I've just had a very important and constructive dialogue with my friend . . . We have had, over the past four years, very constructive relations, and that's the way I'm going to keep it for the next four years, as well."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
Monday, February 28, 2005
'I've gotta get my elephant tusks back'
Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday February 23 2005
In this article, we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.
It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..."
And so on.
A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says.
Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip.
"Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.'
"I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'"
His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America.
That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations.
Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.
Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character".
He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create.
I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs.
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."
His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!"
Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America.
"He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.)
Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it.
"I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight.
As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things.
I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long.
Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday February 23 2005
In this article, we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.
It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..."
And so on.
A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says.
Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip.
"Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.'
"I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'"
His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America.
That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations.
Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.
Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character".
He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create.
I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs.
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."
His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!"
Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America.
"He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.)
Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it.
"I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight.
As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things.
I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Here are a few more thoughts from Hunter. He was not always right....but then he was only seldom wrong:
Hunter S Thompson on work ..."Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." "Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times." "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me." "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like f**king, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.... on drugs ...You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG! I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts... lifestyle advice ...Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a crime-in-progress is not a happy prospect. The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. Anytime there's a big sporting event, go to either the winning or losing town; there'll be riots in both of them. Riots are fun. Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything. Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife. Register at a hotel under a pseudonym, and then rent two convertibles - a Porsche and a green Cadillac - so you can switch cars when things start to go bad. Be sure to launch one of these cars off a steep hill. Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward. Call on God, but row away from the rocks. ... and finally ...The Edge ... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. A word to the wise is infuriating. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
Hunter S Thompson on work ..."Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." "Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times." "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me." "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like f**king, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.... on drugs ...You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG! I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts... lifestyle advice ...Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a crime-in-progress is not a happy prospect. The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. Anytime there's a big sporting event, go to either the winning or losing town; there'll be riots in both of them. Riots are fun. Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything. Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife. Register at a hotel under a pseudonym, and then rent two convertibles - a Porsche and a green Cadillac - so you can switch cars when things start to go bad. Be sure to launch one of these cars off a steep hill. Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward. Call on God, but row away from the rocks. ... and finally ...The Edge ... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. A word to the wise is infuriating. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
ADS EMBEDDED IN NEWS STORIES RAISE CONCERNS
In the never-ending pursuit of profits, online sites are generating
new revenues by selling advertisements that appear when users click on
certain keywords, but when the practice is extended to words in news
articles, critics say it could create the impression that advertisers are
influencing the reporting. Business news articles in yesterday's online New
York Post included words highlighted and underlined in green, which, when a
mouse was rolled over them, produced a box with a link to the "sponsor's"
Web site. Aly Colón, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter
Institute, says the biggest risk may be alienating readers: "If we want to
be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to
devise a way of presenting our material so that the users, the readers,
know that we are first and foremost about the news." A Nielsen/NetRatings
analyst says news organizations' recent experimentation with embedded
advertising reflects a dearth of online advertising opportunities: "There
is definitely a shortage of supply [of online content]. That leads to this
kind of experimentation." (New York Times 24 Feb 2005)
In the never-ending pursuit of profits, online sites are generating
new revenues by selling advertisements that appear when users click on
certain keywords, but when the practice is extended to words in news
articles, critics say it could create the impression that advertisers are
influencing the reporting. Business news articles in yesterday's online New
York Post included words highlighted and underlined in green, which, when a
mouse was rolled over them, produced a box with a link to the "sponsor's"
Web site. Aly Colón, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter
Institute, says the biggest risk may be alienating readers: "If we want to
be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to
devise a way of presenting our material so that the users, the readers,
know that we are first and foremost about the news." A Nielsen/NetRatings
analyst says news organizations' recent experimentation with embedded
advertising reflects a dearth of online advertising opportunities: "There
is definitely a shortage of supply [of online content]. That leads to this
kind of experimentation." (New York Times 24 Feb 2005)
Bill Berkowitz writes that the Center for Media and Democracy's
"sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media
and undermine democracy for more than a decade," and are now
"setting about an ambitious - yet necessary - undertaking:
reinventing journalism." Berkowitz interviews Center founder Stauber
about recent media scandals involving PR, payola, and fake
journalists. They also discuss SourceWatch, "an information source
that is truly 'of, by and for the people,'" and other ways the
Center works to further media democracy.
SOURCE: Alternet, February 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3300
"sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media
and undermine democracy for more than a decade," and are now
"setting about an ambitious - yet necessary - undertaking:
reinventing journalism." Berkowitz interviews Center founder Stauber
about recent media scandals involving PR, payola, and fake
journalists. They also discuss SourceWatch, "an information source
that is truly 'of, by and for the people,'" and other ways the
Center works to further media democracy.
SOURCE: Alternet, February 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3300
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
The Gonzo has died. We watched part of the film Fear and Loathing in Los Vagas last term - which is part of the story of a man who changed journalism in our times.
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:
Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'
Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created
Ripples spread far from writer's work
Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control
By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005
I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.
I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.
What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.
What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.
The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.
It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.
In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.
Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.
Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.
If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.
We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.
For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.
My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.
He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.
Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.
Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts
ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.
In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.
Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.
The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.
Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.
He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.
But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.
In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.
A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).
Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.
He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.
He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).
He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.
He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.
Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:
Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'
Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created
Ripples spread far from writer's work
Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control
By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005
I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.
I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.
What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.
What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.
The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.
It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.
In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.
Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.
Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.
If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.
We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.
For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.
My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.
He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.
Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.
Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts
ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.
In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.
Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.
The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.
Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.
He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.
But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.
In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.
A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).
Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.
He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.
He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).
He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.
He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.
Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).
Friday, February 18, 2005
Have you read your electronic news today?
NEWSPAPERS TO CYBERJOURNALISTS: SHALL WE DANCE?
CNet editor Jeff Pelline says when he quit a steady newspaper job
nine years ago to launch CNet's News.com site, his friends and coworkers
thought he was nuts, but it turns out he was just ahead of the curve. "Now
the print media giants are changing their tune -- albeit more from a
defensive than offensive posture. Stuck with stagnant growth and under
pressure from Wall Street, these companies are taking their biggest plunge
yet into the Internet pool," says Pelline. He cites Thursday's announcement
by the New York Times that it's acquiring information portal About.com for
$410 million from Primedia and the Washington Post's December deal to
purchase online magazine Slate from Microsoft as harbingers of a new
détente between old and new media. "This year will no doubt go down as a
time when Internet and print media companies danced like never before,"
says Pelline. "For star-struck Internet companies, it may be a reality
check to have to dance with old timers. But the old timers sure don't mind:
It puts more dance in their step than a new pair of wingtip shoes." (CNet
News.com 18 Feb 2005)
NEWSPAPERS TO CYBERJOURNALISTS: SHALL WE DANCE?
CNet editor Jeff Pelline says when he quit a steady newspaper job
nine years ago to launch CNet's News.com site, his friends and coworkers
thought he was nuts, but it turns out he was just ahead of the curve. "Now
the print media giants are changing their tune -- albeit more from a
defensive than offensive posture. Stuck with stagnant growth and under
pressure from Wall Street, these companies are taking their biggest plunge
yet into the Internet pool," says Pelline. He cites Thursday's announcement
by the New York Times that it's acquiring information portal About.com for
$410 million from Primedia and the Washington Post's December deal to
purchase online magazine Slate from Microsoft as harbingers of a new
détente between old and new media. "This year will no doubt go down as a
time when Internet and print media companies danced like never before,"
says Pelline. "For star-struck Internet companies, it may be a reality
check to have to dance with old timers. But the old timers sure don't mind:
It puts more dance in their step than a new pair of wingtip shoes." (CNet
News.com 18 Feb 2005)
Thursday, February 17, 2005
What the mouth says and the body does are often different and a journalist should remind her readers of this fact.
NOT WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cameroon14feb14,0,2420523.story?coll=la-home-headlines
When Paul Biya, "the strongman who has ruled the West African
country of Cameroon for more than 20 years swept to another election
victory last fall, a number of observers quickly questioned the
process." But not the U.S. Association of Former Members of
Congress, who said, "This is what democracy is about." Their
delegation was organized by "a lobbyist for Biya's government," who
"served as the mission's chief staffer and billed Cameroon for his
work. Biya's government also picked up the $80,000 tab for the
Americans' visit. And a month after the group left, one of the six
observers signed his own lobbying contract with Cameroon."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3276
NOT WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cameroon14feb14,0,2420523.story?coll=la-home-headlines
When Paul Biya, "the strongman who has ruled the West African
country of Cameroon for more than 20 years swept to another election
victory last fall, a number of observers quickly questioned the
process." But not the U.S. Association of Former Members of
Congress, who said, "This is what democracy is about." Their
delegation was organized by "a lobbyist for Biya's government," who
"served as the mission's chief staffer and billed Cameroon for his
work. Biya's government also picked up the $80,000 tab for the
Americans' visit. And a month after the group left, one of the six
observers signed his own lobbying contract with Cameroon."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3276
Monday, February 07, 2005
New Radio for everyone?
HERE COME THE PODCASTERS
It's called "podcasting," and it has the potential of changing the
dynamics of broadcasting the same way blogs have changed the dynamics of
print and TV journalism. Podcasting allows anyone with a PC to become a
broadcaster -- at virtually no cost. Programs distributed with this
technology can be received anywhere, anytime (without requiring the listener
to be near a PC), and they can be paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The
number of regular podcasts is now more than 800, with many focusing on
gadgets, technology, new bands and music, or developments in politics,
movies and sports. One podcaster says, "It would be great if I made a
fortune doing it, but I don't see how that could possibly happen. I'm not
really trying for it, either. I'm hoping to meet some interesting people and
establish some good communications with people on weird topics." (AP/USA
Today 7 Feb 2005)
HERE COME THE PODCASTERS
It's called "podcasting," and it has the potential of changing the
dynamics of broadcasting the same way blogs have changed the dynamics of
print and TV journalism. Podcasting allows anyone with a PC to become a
broadcaster -- at virtually no cost. Programs distributed with this
technology can be received anywhere, anytime (without requiring the listener
to be near a PC), and they can be paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The
number of regular podcasts is now more than 800, with many focusing on
gadgets, technology, new bands and music, or developments in politics,
movies and sports. One podcaster says, "It would be great if I made a
fortune doing it, but I don't see how that could possibly happen. I'm not
really trying for it, either. I'm hoping to meet some interesting people and
establish some good communications with people on weird topics." (AP/USA
Today 7 Feb 2005)
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Here are to articles, one on a challenge to the definition of what is it to be a journalist and the second about manipulated photos:WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT JOURNALISM IS?
A California court will soon decide whether bloggers have the same
legal protections as journalists under "shield" laws that protect reporters
from revealing their sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt
Opsahl, who represents two bloggers targeted by Apple for leaking
information about new company products, maintains that if the bloggers are
forced to give up their sources "the public will lose out on a vital outlet
for independent news, analysis, and commentary." An opposing view is offered
by University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson, who says that simply
expressing opinions to a tiny audience isn't journalism -- because if it
were "then I'm a journalist when I write a letter to my mother reporting on
what I'm doing. I don't think the free-press clause [of the U.S.
Constitution] was intended to extend its protections to letters to mothers
from sons." (USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
YOUR LYING EYES IN THE PHOTOSHOP AGE
Have the ethics of photojournalism been changed in some way by such
software as Adobe Photoshop, which allows easy manipulation of digital
photos? The National Press Photographers Association says it's wrong to
alter the content of a photograph "in any way that deceives the public," and
the director of photography at the Los Angeles Times director of photography
says, "If our readers can't count on honesty from us, I don't know what we
have left." Dartmouth computer science professor Hany Farid is working to
solve the problem of dishonest photographs by developing computer algorithms
that can detect when an image has been altered. But Farid says, "It's a bit
of an arms race. It's tamper and tamper protection, and we can already
predict who's going to win. We simply make it harder" for the average person
with the average amount of skill to get away with photographic deceptions.
(CSM/USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
A California court will soon decide whether bloggers have the same
legal protections as journalists under "shield" laws that protect reporters
from revealing their sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt
Opsahl, who represents two bloggers targeted by Apple for leaking
information about new company products, maintains that if the bloggers are
forced to give up their sources "the public will lose out on a vital outlet
for independent news, analysis, and commentary." An opposing view is offered
by University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson, who says that simply
expressing opinions to a tiny audience isn't journalism -- because if it
were "then I'm a journalist when I write a letter to my mother reporting on
what I'm doing. I don't think the free-press clause [of the U.S.
Constitution] was intended to extend its protections to letters to mothers
from sons." (USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
YOUR LYING EYES IN THE PHOTOSHOP AGE
Have the ethics of photojournalism been changed in some way by such
software as Adobe Photoshop, which allows easy manipulation of digital
photos? The National Press Photographers Association says it's wrong to
alter the content of a photograph "in any way that deceives the public," and
the director of photography at the Los Angeles Times director of photography
says, "If our readers can't count on honesty from us, I don't know what we
have left." Dartmouth computer science professor Hany Farid is working to
solve the problem of dishonest photographs by developing computer algorithms
that can detect when an image has been altered. But Farid says, "It's a bit
of an arms race. It's tamper and tamper protection, and we can already
predict who's going to win. We simply make it harder" for the average person
with the average amount of skill to get away with photographic deceptions.
(CSM/USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
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