It's your chance to vote for the worst candidates -- and enjoy it!

Now's the time for you to participate in the fifth annual "Falsies Awards" contest, held by the Center for Media and Democracy to shine an unflattering light on those responsible for polluting our information environment.

As you look back at 2008, who stands out, for their shameless spinning? The ballot includes sneaky spooks, pandering pundits, big business bullies, and many more.

Click here to cast your vote today!

"Black man, black woman, black baby /
White man, white woman, white baby /
White man, black woman, black baby /
Black man, white woman, black baby."
Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet

There is no doubt that the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is historic. But does framing him as America's "first black president" show that we have not come nearly as far as we'd like to think?

The mainstream U.S. news -- and the majority of the American public, whether for or against him -- consider Barack Obama to be the first African American President. While he is certainly a member of the black community (and much more literally African-American due to his father being a Kenyan immigrant), he is also equally part of the white community. His mother was white. The grandmother who helped raise him (and whom he tragically lost to cancer on the eve of his election) was also white. But historically, and apparently to this day, to be black to any degree is to be exclusively black. Is our celebration of Barack Obama as the first black president proof that we haven't moved very far past the "one-drop rule"?

With the start of the school year, debate has heated up again about Gardasil, Merck's vaccine against human papillomavirus. Since writing my series of four articles on The Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer last year, I have continued to track the developments and have noticed some interesting trends. While Gardasil has not been the financial jackpot that Merck was hoping it would be, there is still a steady push for vaccination and even still for mandates. Even though it has not played out as positively as Merck planned, it is too early to turn our attention away from their efforts to sell their so-called "vaccine against cancer." Merck's obvious corporate steamrolling has generated a public backlash and has also faced general concerns about possible health risks from vaccinations, along with conservative opposition to the idea of government health mandates. These reactions slowed the company's money train but didn't bring it to a full stop.

In the spring of 2007, when author Ted Nace set out to profile the emerging No New Coal Plants movement for Orion magazine, he had no idea that the assignment would turn into more than just a single article.

Nace had become interested in the anti-coal movement after reading an article in The Nation magazine, in which NASA's chief climate scientist James E. Hansen warned that another decade of continued growth in greenhouse gases would "guarantee" enough dramatic climate change to produce what Hansen called "a different planet." Hansen made it clear that the most important step that needed to be taken to avoid such a consequence was an immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power plants.

The Power of the Swarm

As Nace explored the anti-coal movement, he found that some of the most effective work was being done by small, rurally-based, grassroots groups linked together informally through computer networks. His Orion article, "Stopping Coal in Its Tracks," noted that in many cases this decentralized "swarm" had been more militant and more effective than the large groups known as Big Green.

Nace set up the website Coal Moratorium Now! to organize the information he was gathering on coal, then recruited two researchers, Meilin Chin and Michelle Chandra, to help him track down the status of every proposed coal plant they could locate. As word of the coal plants database spread, several people proposed moving it onto a wiki so that it could be more easily accessed and edited by multiple researchers.

"The American public deserves to know when someone is trying to persuade them." — U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Thursday, January 17, 2008

Front Groups Beware of Full Frontal Scrutiny

Today, the Center for Media and Democracy and our partners at Consumer Reports WebWatch launched an exciting new project: Full Frontal Scrutiny. The site seeks to shine a light on front groups -- organizations that state a particular agenda, while hiding or obscuring their identity, membership or sponsorship, or all three. Google the term "front groups" and the number one return is CMD’s extensive articles on its SourceWatch site.

WebWatch and CMD will create original content for Full Frontal Scrutiny, which will also publish selected content from WebWatch and from the CMD's SourceWatch and PRwatch sites, as well as aggregating news about front groups from other reliable sources.

As CMD Research Director Sheldon Rampton said, "Full Frontal Scrutiny will be like no other site on the Web. Fakers, phonies and front groups beware -- you will be exposed."