This post is a follow-up to an article by Andrew Adam Newman that appeared in Adweek on May 5, 2008 called The True Story of a Bogus Blog, via PRWatch.org

Report: Hunter College Probe Slams Coach-Sponsored PR Class
Adweek
by Andrew Adam Newman
May 9, 2008

The course was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach as part of a college outreach effort by the IACC.

New York: A Hunter College Senate Committee’s investigation of a Coach-sponsored PR class slams the college’s administration on numerous academic freedom grounds and says that the PR practices taught in the class were “deeply troubling.”

As detailed Monday in Adweek, the course taught last spring at Hunter in New York was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach and was part of a college outreach campaign by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a trade group that includes Coach and other brands like Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., Louis Vuitton and Rolex. A class, acting as an idea-pitching and campaign-executing agency for Coach and the trade group, invented a blogging student named Heidi Cee whose posts on Facebook and MySpace try to dissuade students from buying counterfeit goods. PR observers and bloggers faulted the campaign for being deceptive.

The findings in the below report, which was leaked to Adweek and is scheduled to be presented on May 21 to the full college senate, largely echo the concerns of Stuart Ewen, one of two Hunter professors who made the complaint that led to the investigation, namely that the professor who taught the course was “coerced” to do so, that the trade group’s and Coach’s hands-on involvement with the course “was clearly a violation of academic freedom,” and that that the course was initiated at the behest of the administration rather than the faculty. (more…)

Pentagon’s Propaganda Documents Go Online, but Will the TV Networks Ever Report this Scandal?
by John Stauber
Center for Media and Democracy/PR Watch
May 6, 2008

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon’s illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers — most of them with financial ties to war contractors — into the TV networks as “message surrogates” for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences. (more…)

L.A. ‘Times’ Duped on Tupac-Diddy Story
by Jessica Coen
New York Magazine, Daily Intel
March 26, 2008

For all of you I Love the 90s fans who are heartsick for a little East Coast–West Coast rivalry, last week was a big one: The Los Angeles Times reported that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of the Quad Recording Studios in midtown was carried out by associates of none other than Sean “Diddy” Combs, who knew about the whole thing beforehand. Sinister, Diddy! (Or were you Puff Daddy back then?) But today the boy geniuses over at the Smoking Gun report a major twist: The L.A. Times story was based on fabricated FBI reports, and the paper was victim of a hoax by an imprisoned con man. An imprisoned con man? You mean journalists weren’t even duped by a published memoirist this time?!

The con man is rap fan James Sabatino, who TSG describes as an “accomplished document forger” — yeah, that sounds about right, considering he forged the FBI documents on which poor Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Chuck Phillips based his story. Sabatino’s a real gem, of course:

[He] created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’s trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud. [He] has long sought to insinuate himself, after the fact, in a series of important hip-hop events, from Shakur’s shooting to the murder of The Notorious B.I.G.. In fact, however, Sabatino was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as “a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.”

The lengthy explanation of how Sabatino actually created the false FBI documents and then got them into the hands of the Times such that the whole thing was believable is pretty complicated, enough so to make our heads spin. But that’s nothing compared to how lightheaded Phillips is probably feeling right now.

[Check the whole story out here]: Big Phat Liar [Smoking Gun]

thanks Sam Wood

Photo: The Smoking Gun

NBC ‘Predator’ lawsuit: journalism on trial
by Douglas Lee
Special to the First Amendment Center Online
March 4, 2008

Yes, it’s only a ruling on a motion to dismiss. And, yes, in such a ruling, the plaintiff’s allegations are presumed to be true. And, yes, it’s only the ruling of a trial judge, not a ruling of an appellate court establishing new precedent.

So, yes, many reasons exist to minimize the importance of the recent ruling in Conradt v. NBC Universal, Inc. At the same time, many reasons exist for NBC to be concerned.

In Conradt, Patricia Conradt is suing NBC for the network’s role in her brother’s suicide. Conradt claims NBC, in an effort to create a sensational arrest for “Dateline NBC: To Catch A Predator,” recklessly orchestrated a police action that caused her brother to take his life.

On Feb. 26, 2008, Denny Chin, a U.S. district judge sitting in the Southern District of New York, held that Conradt’s case could proceed. While he dismissed seven of Conradt’s claims, Chin ruled that the most serious of her allegations — that NBC had violated her brother’s civil rights and had intentionally caused him emotional distress — warranted a jury trial. “[A] reasonable jury,” Chin wrote, “could find that NBC crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement.” (more…)

From Skeptic.com:

In this week’s eSkeptic, Steve Salerno discusses the fundamental flaws of broadcast journalism as a tool for informing viewers.

Journalist-Bites-Reality!
by Steve Salerno
eSkeptic.com
February 13, 2008

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil.

It is the measure of the media’s obsession with its “pedophiles run amok!” story line that so many of us are on a first-name basis with the victims: Polly, Amber, JonBenet, Danielle, Elizabeth, Samantha. And now there is Madeleine. Clearly these crimes were and are horrific, and nothing here is intended to diminish the parents’ loss. But something else has been lost in the bargain as journalists tirelessly stoke fear of strangers, segueing from nightly-news segments about cyber-stalkers and “the rapist in your neighborhood” to prime-time reality series like Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” That “something else” is reality.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time — and just 3 percentof the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true “predators” so much as confused or unruly teens.) Overall, the odds that one of America’s 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: “Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers.” (more…)

Weird Recruiting Saga Comes to Close
by Ryan Canner-O’Mealy
February 7, 2008

By now you’ve probably heard the strange-but-true story of Kevin Hart, a football player at Fernley (Fernley, Nev.).

In preparation for yesterday’s National Signing Day, Hart held a press conference at his school last Friday to announce he would be signing with California over Oregon. Local television and print reporters came to his announcement, as did the entire Fernley student body.

That’s when things got weird.

When contacted by media outlets trying to get some inside info on Hart, both the Cal and Oregon coaches said they had never heard of him. He hadn’t been offered a scholarship by either school, and it was clear he wouldn’t be going to Cal. (more…)

[Editor’s note: Sounds a bit like You’ve Got to be Kidneying from Snopes.com. If you read down to the bottom of that link, you’ll find a hauntingly similar story that was reported in May of 1998. Perhaps it’s been a slow news week in New Delhi.]

Indian Police Probe Transplant Ring
by Sam Dolnick
1010 WINS
January 28, 2008

New Delhi (AP) — Police said they were raiding hospitals and guest houses Monday as part of their investigation into an illegal transplant racket that allegedly removed kidneys from up to 500 poor laborers and sold their organs to wealthy clients.

Police suspect that dozens of doctors were involved in the kidney racket, which had a waiting list of some 40 people hailing from at least five countries.

The scam, centered in Gurgaon - a posh suburb of New Delhi - used luxury cars outfitted with blood-testing machines to test donors on the fly as well as sophisticated surgical equipment hidden inside a residential neighborhood.

The sprawling investigation is ongoing and police are raiding hospitals’ offices and guest houses, Gurgaon Police Commissioner Mohinder Lal told reporters in Gurgaon on Monday.

The primary suspects, who police said have been tied to organ transplant rackets in the past, have apparently fled the country, Lal said.

“We suspect around 400 or 500 kidney transplants were done by these doctors over the last nine years,” Lal told reporters last week. (more…)

Dean: Terminate My Impostor
New York Post, Page Six
January 28, 2008

Fans of Dean Winters, beware! An impostor has been posing as the actor from Oz and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The 6-foot-1 heartthrob told Page Six: “Four years ago, I met a girl in Bungalow 8. She said, ‘Oh. My friend knows you’… But we’d never met. I’ve had other reports of being places where I wasn’t.

“A female friend told me, ‘I had fun talking to you on your MySpace page.’ I said I don’t have a MySpace page.’ She said, ‘I thought maybe it wasn’t you, because you made some inappropriate comments.”

Winters, who also stars with Thora Birch in the upcoming drama Winter of Frozen Dreams, continued: “Two weeks ago, this Russian girl came up to me and said, ‘Are you Dean Winters? Wait here.’ She brings her friend over, and her friend says, ‘That’s not him.’ She’d had a five-month relationship with this impostor thinking it was me.”

Read the rest of the story here.

False Pretenses
by Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith
The Center for Public Integrity
January, 2008

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carfully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war. (more…)

‘Hoax mummy’ still awaits burial in Pakistan
Karachi News.Net (ANI)
January 26, 2008

London, The mummified body of a woman, which was (e)arlier, considered dating back to the 6th century BC and later (d)iscovered to be a hoax, is still awaiting burial in the city of (K)arachi in Pakistan.

According to a report in BBC, Pakistani police discovered the (m)ummy in 2000, during a murder investigation.

After the script on the coffin dated the mummy to 6th century (P)ersia, both Iran and Pakistan claimed it as their own.

But subsequent examination by experts found that the body was not (m)ore than a few years old and the woman was apparently mummified (b)y antiques smugglers and touted as an archaeological find.

“It was of a middle-aged woman who probably died in 1996 or 97 (b)ecause of a broken back,” said Dr Asma Ibrahim, an archaeologist (w)ho was then curator of the Karachi Museum and a member of the (t)eam that examined the mummy.

As for the evidence for the mummy being a hoax, Asma said, “There (w)ere flaws in the ancient script, and a physical examination (s)howed that the process of mummification was also not the same as (t)hat followed in ancient Iran.”

The body is now being kept in the mortuary of the Edhi Trust, (w)hich is waiting for the police departments of Balochistan and (S)indh to authorise the burial.

“Keeping a body in the mortuary for three days costs us 500 (r)upees and this body has been lying here for seven years,” said nwar Kazmi, a trust spokesman.

According to Kazmi, Edhi Trust has since written to Karachi (M)useum for permission to bury the body, but has been told that a (c)learance must come from the police because the body is property (o)f a criminal case.

“But, the police seem to have lost all interest in the case,” (s)aid Kazmi.

“We have been writing to the authorities in Sindh and (B)alochistan, but there has been no reply,” he added.

via Topix