Web journalist and novelist Daniel Price points out that here at the Center for Media & Democracy we have been sounding the alarm on Video News Releases for over a decade. Price writes that "thanks to the Medicare fake news flap (see 3/22 'spin of the day' below) America has been formally introduced to the Video News Release. Except they've been around for twenty years and we've already seen thousands of them. You know life is getting strange when even Jon Stewart can't handle the irony.

Communications consultant Fraser Seitel says this year's presidential campaign "promises to be the filthiest, grimiest, most mean-spirited in the history of the Republic." He predicts: "the Karl Rovian/ Bob Shrumian mega-million dollar PR strategies" will have Bush slamming Kerry as a "position-hopping, tax-popping, liberal toady" and Kerry painting Bush as a "bible thumping, fat cat pumping, right wing wildman." Noting Bus

"Canadian investigators have identified... the probable source of recent cases of mad-cow disease in North America," reports the Wall Street Journal. Canada imported 192 cattle from Britain in the 1980s. After one of the British cows tested positive for mad cow disease in 1993, Canadian officials tried to "remove" them from domestic herds. But 68 cows were missing, "most likely because they already had been slaughtered." Canada's Food Inspection Agency concluded that "the infected U.S.