Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’
by Joanne Kaufman
The New York Times
June 30, 2008

The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”

There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations? (more…)

Pinkwashing: Can Shopping Cure Breast Cancer?
by Anne Landman
Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch
June 11, 2008

You’ve heard the term “greenwashing.” It refers to corporations that try to appear “green” without reducing their negative impact on the environment.

Since 2002, the group Breast Cancer Action has promoted its “Think Before You Pink” campaign. It’s fighting “pinkwashing,” which is when corporations try to boost sales by associating their products with the fight against breast cancer. Pinkwashing is a form of slacktivism — a campaign that makes people feel like they’re helping solve a problem, while they’re actually doing more to boost corporate profits. Pinkwashing has been around for a while, but is now reaching almost unbelievable levels.

The worst pinkwashers exploit the intense emotions associated with breast cancer while selling products that actually contribute to breast cancer.

So how can the average person recognize pinkwashing? Here are some examples. (more…)

Campaign: Michelle Obama never used word ‘Whitey’
by Nedra Pickler
1010WINS
June 12, 2008

Washington (AP) — Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign said Thursday that Michelle Obama never used the word “whitey” in a speech from the church pulpit as it launched a Web site to debunk rumors about him and his wife.

The rumor that Michelle Obama railed against “whitey” in a diatribe at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ has circulated on conservative Republican blogs for weeks and was repeated by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The rumor included claims of a videotape of the speech that would be used to bring down Obama’s candidacy this fall.

“No such tape exists,” the campaign responds on the site, http://www.fightthesmears.com. “Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word.”

The site is a response to the realities of a brave new world, where information travels 24 hours a day on blogs and voters are increasingly turning to the Internet for information. It’s a particular problem for Obama, a relative newcomer to national politics who is still unknown to many voters and has been the target of persistent misinformation campaigns online. (more…)

Corporate-Sponsored “Slacktivism”: Bigger and More Dangerous than the Urban Dictionary Realizes
by Anne Landman
The Weekly Spin, PRWatch.org
June 2, 2008

Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like “hobosexual” (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), “consumerican,” (”a particularly American brand of consumerism”), and “wikidemia” (”an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia”).

Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: “slacktivism.”

“Slacktivism” (alternative spelling “slactivism”) is a fusion of the words “slacker” and “activism,” and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to “support the troops,” wearing a colored rubber wristband to “fight cancer,” or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas. (more…)

From Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films:

There’s no question John McCain is getting a free ride from the mainstream press. But with the power of YouTube and the blogosphere, we can provide an accurate portrayal of the so-called Maverick. We can put the brakes on his free ride!

Since we first released The Real McCain a year ago, our REAL McCain series has garnered close to 2 million views, with over 13,000 comments and tens of thousands more in petition signatures! Clearly, John McCain’s record is something the public wants to discuss, and yet the corporate media is doing NOTHING to present the truth. We feel obliged to continue countering the mainstream media’s love of McCain. And so we thought it was high time for a sequel: The Real McCain 2:

thanks Abe

In case you missed the first The REAL McCain, posted a year ago by Brave New Films here it is: (more…)

Message Machine: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
by David Barstow
New York Times
April 20, 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

Read the rest of the article here. It’s long but fascinating.

And, check out this New York Times multi-media report, How the Pentagon Spread Its Message also by David Barstow, April 20, 2008.

Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times, examines primary source documents detailing the Pentagon’s response to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld by a group of prominent retired generals.

thanks Nancy

11 reasons ‘investor literacy’ is a big hoax
by Paul B. Farrell
MarketWatch
April 15, 2008

Commentary: Wall Street prefers clueless, irrational investors

Arroyo Grande, Calif. (MarketWatch) — So Congress made April “Investor Literacy Month.” What a hoax, a cruel joke, yes, an insult to America’s 95 million investors.

What’s really happening? Here’s the short version: In the past five years Wall Street’s out-of-control greed (with the backing of Greenspan’s cheap-money Fed, an “anything-goes, free-market” White House and a banking industry that loves piling up debt in order to charge excessive fees) created a massive housing-credit bubble to rapidly replace their earlier busted dot-com bubble.

Then last summer the new bubble failed, exploding in our faces, nearly destroying the global monetary system. Result? These two bubbles triggered a diversionary, knee-jerk reaction: A wave of so-called “investor education” programs across the U.S. and world.

That’s the joke, the hoax, the insult. Get it? Wall Street’s greed nearly destroys the world’s economy twice in less than a decade. Solution? Bail out Wall Street, then blame it on the little guy, the Main Street investor, for not being “educated enough!” That’s a hoax. (more…)

Submitted by Josh Jasper:

How local TV embraced fake news
Americans’ first source in news is overrun by marketing videos.
by Farhad Manjoo

Note: Here is another excerpt from my new book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. (For previous excerpts, see here and here.) The book argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture’s grip on what people once called “objective reality.” Here, I look at how fakery has overrun local TV news.

Excerpted from True Enough by Farhad Manjoo (Wiley, 2008)

Late in the holiday shopping season of 2005, Robin Raskin began to worry about a hidden danger posed by the world’s most popular gadget: Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she’d once written a magazine column called “Internet Mom”). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.

“There’s scores of ‘iPorn’ everywhere,” Raskin warned in an appearance on KGUN, an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz. The iPod had become “a pedophile’s playground,” she said, and Apple was doing little to stem the smut. On Pittsburgh’s Fox affiliate, WPGH Channel 53, Raskin called the iPod one of the “scariest” gifts of the season. The ABC station in Columbus, Ohio, featured Raskin’s warnings as part of a report by Kent Justice, a correspondent who produces a regular segment called “On Your Side.” Justice told viewers, “If you didn’t know it, now prepare for it: Hundreds of Web sites are selling iPorn.”

Nine stations aired Raskin’s warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11. (more…)

Editor’s update: The Toronto Star did a more probbing story on Ashton Kutcher’s new television series “Pop Fiction” the purpose of which is purportedly to teach paparazzi a thing or two. Called “Paparazzi, you’ve been punk’d”, it aptly ends with a flourish:

Pop Fiction wants the world to know celebrity journalism is unfair, blinkered, mendacious, ridiculous and abusive.

I’m not defending anything or anyone. But if it wasn’t for celebrity journalism, the world would not care about these people in the first place.

As reported here on March 9, 2008:

Hilton’s ‘Guru’ Date Was Set Up for Kutcher’s New Prank TV Show
by Wenn
Hollywood.com
March 6, 2008

Hollywood - Paris Hilton’s night out in Hollywood with a bearded ‘guru’ last Saturday was staged by Punk’d star Ashton Kutcher for a new TV show, designed to exploit the media.

Hilton made headlines around the world when she stepped out with an orange-robed, grey-haired ’shaman’ who proceeded to bless her and then encouraged her to donate a diamond necklace to a stranger.

However, as previously reported by WENN, the ‘guru’ was actually an actor named Maxie Santillan Jr..

And it has now emerged that the incident was a prank for Kutcher’s new show Pop Fiction, which will feature 20 celebrities, including several superstars, who are all in on the joke.

Kutcher and his business partner Jason Goldberg produce the new program, which highlights the gullibility of the paparazzi and the media and is set to premiere on E! on Sunday.

Goldberg says, “We live in a culture that’s driven by media and obsessed with celebrity, to the point where they don’t have private lives anymore.

“Two people going out to eat turns into, ‘They’re engaged.’ It’s a feeding frenzy. It’s dangerous and it’s irresponsible in some cases.

“We’re having fun, but we want to say to people, ‘Can you really believe everything you read and see?’”

photo: Dave Edwards © 2008 DailyCeleb.com

thanks Susan

Harry’s tour dismissed as ‘failed stunt’ by PR guru
Public won’t be fooled by ‘virtual reality’ deployment, says Clifford
by Sam Marsden
Independent.ie
March 2, 2008

Top publicist Max Clifford yesterday launched a broadside at Prince Harry’s tour of duty in Afghanistan. Clifford said the tour was a “PR stunt” that has not fooled the public.

AP Video:

The Household Cavalry officer’s 10-week deployment to the frontline in Helmand Province was “virtual reality” because army chiefs would have kept him away from real danger, the PR guru claimed.

It will not change British public opinion about Harry as people reflect that there are thousands of ordinary British troops serving in Afghanistan without receiving the same special treatment, Mr Clifford added.

“To me it’s blatantly obvious. It’s a PR stunt, the whole thing has been put together,” he said.

“The climate when he went out, (he) was getting increasing bad publicity from hanging around in clubs and pubs, and coming out drunk.

“It happened immediately after that. I don’t think you’re cynical for saying, ‘hold on a minute’ … I think that most discerning people see it as a pure public relations exercise.” (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…)

House candidate mum on doctored campaign photo
His aide says there wasn’t time for photo session
by Alan Bernstein
Houston Chronicle
January 18, 2007

The brochure that U.S. House candidate and former Sugar Land mayor Dean Hrbacek mailed to voters this week says, “Dean’s record speaks for itself.”

But his physique does not. In a photo next to the words of praise, Hrbacek’s body is spoken for by the torso of an appreciably slimmer man.

The picture, presented as a true image of the candidate, is actually a computerized composite of Hrbacek’s face and someone else’s figure, in suit and tie, from neck to knee caps. The give-away is a flawed fit of head and collar.

Hrbacek, a tax lawyer and accountant, did not return calls about the campaign literature Thursday. He is among 10 Republicans seeking the nomination to run against U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Stafford.

But campaign manager Scott Broschart admitted the image is a fake. (more…)

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The Whoppers of 2007
December 30, 2007
by Brooks Jackson, with the staff of
FactCheck.org

We review some notable political falsehoods and distortions of the year.

Summary

The year 2007 wasn’t a good one for political honesty. Though not even technically an election year, it provided a bumper crop of falsehoods and distortions nonetheless.

Presidential candidates kept us busy:

Misinformation came both from Congress and the White House: (more…)

From daddytypes.com, December 19, 2007:

Brit Crit Makes Your Kid’s Artwork Into His Artwork, Sells It Back To You For $260

There’s a populist sentiment afoot in Great Britain that considers the entire contemporary art world to be a giant joke perpetrated on culture generally and rich people with more money than sense in particular.

Without that setting, artist/writer Dan Crowe’s pompous-and-inept-criticism-for-pay project, Kinbote’s Bespoke Art Commentary Service would make even less sense than it already does.

For £130-190, Crowe will write a 300-500 word critique of your kid’s artwork. As the name implies, it’s supposed to be in the voice of a delusional, self-important critic like Charles Kinbote, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s awesome annotated poem/novel, Pale Fire. Unfortunately, the examples published so far come off sounding more like a slightly overenthusiastic Sister Wendy impersonator.

Gawker sees the whole thing as a prank, while the Times of London appears to take Kinbote’s very seriously on its face. But the key to Crowe’s project lies in his description of the finished product: (more…)

Republicans Debate in Des Moines
FactCheck.org
December 12, 2007

More exaggerations and mis-statements in the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses.

Summary:

Read the detailed analysis here.

The 90-minute debate was sponsored by the Des Moines Register and televised nationally on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and C-SPAN3. It was the final debate among GOP candidates before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential nomination caucuses, which are scheduled for January 3.