"Last week, one simple health message dominated the US media: radical prostate surgery for prostate cancer saves lives. The media were reporting the results of a Swedish trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine yet the trial showed no such thing," reports Jeanne Lenzer. In reality, observes Dr. Otis Brawley at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, "men who have prostatectomies just exchange one form of death for another within six years." Dr.

Madison Avenue-style advertising aimed at Middle Eastern audiences isn't likely to work for the U.S. government, says Harold C. Pachios, chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. "There's more to America than Calvin Klein jeans--and that's the point," said Harold C. Pachios, chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. "We are thought of as superficial, so we need to avoid anything that smacks of the superficial."

No one really knows what police tipster Eunice Stone heard Ayman Gheith and two other Arab-American medical students saying at a Shoney's restaurant in Georgia. The evidence now suggests that the whole sorry episode was based on a misunderstanding, but that hasn't stopped pundits from simply assuming that the medical students were perpetrating a deliberate hoax. "Almost uniformly, the cable press corps simply assumed that Gheith and his colleagues had behaved inappropriately," writes Bob Somerby.