"Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday in a rural West Virginia community bristling with flags, yellow ribbons and TV news trucks," Reuters reports. "But when the 20-year-old supply clerk arrives by Blackhawk helicopter to the embrace of family and friends, media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters.

"A privacy group is blasting a unit of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its PR plans for a controversial product-ID technology and other internal documents labeled confidential that were posted on its public website," PR Week's John Frank writes. Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) has been raising the red flag over privacy concerns associated with the use of tiny radio-frequency transmitting ID tags in consumer products.

A USDA program billed to educate schools, parents and children on food irradiation was actually designed to promote irradiation and convince school districts to serve irradiated meat according to a new report by Public Citizen.