Good PR practitioners can reinvent themselves as journalists. William Safire is a Pulitzer Prize winning opinion columnist with the New York Times, but his background and love is as a right-wing propagandist. He began his career as a PR executive who helped manage the now-infamous Nixon-Kruschev "kitchen debate" during the Cold War, then went on to advise and write speeches for Nixon in the White House before jumping that sinking ship to land a stateroom on the opinion pages of the New York Times.

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times examines some of the different ways in which TV networks are marketing the war in the US and abroad. CNN in the US has been careful not to transmit too many images of the Afghan civilian victims of US bombings, but CNN International is showing the rest of the world different images. In other words CNN is targeting audiences by supplying the different images their different viewers most want to see, typical in the world of TV marketing and ratings wars.

Despite repeated assertions by President Bush and his top advisers that their global campaign against terrorism will be a "new kind of war," the biggest recipients of the new weapons spending sparked by the September 11 attacks will be the usual suspects: big defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The "wartime opportunists" are "on high alert," writes William Hartung.