Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Channel's primetime debate show, figures prominently in the network's campaign to market its right-leaning programming as "fair & balanced." Actually, the program exemplifies the way Fox jiggers the balance to favor conservatives.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
The director of "The Reagans" complained Monday that CBS butchered his made-for-TV movie, ultimately making it too incoherent for the network to air. According to Robert Ackerman, CBS expressed no problems until after a "rough cut" was hurriedly delivered in October. At that point, the network ordered changes to the dialogue that were "nonnegotiable," he said. "What they were doing with the structure of the film, I thought, was making it incoherent," Ackerman said.
Submitted by John Stauber on
A news release from the Environmental Working Group reveals that "the chemical industry plans to conduct a covert campaign attacking the growing movement in California for more chemical safety testing, with tactics including the creation of phony front groups and spying on activists, according to an internal American Chemistry Council (ACC) memo. ...
Submitted by John Stauber on
"James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups.
Submitted by Laura Miller on
"McDonald's chairman and CEO Jim Cantalupo sent an open letter to the press last week complaining about the inclusion of the pseudo-word 'McJobs' in the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary," PR Week writes in its PR Play of the Week feature.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Mexican restaurant chain Chi-Chi's has brought in CCG Strategic Communications to deal with PR crisis due to an outbreak of Hepatitis A linked to the restaurant, which has sickened 500 people and killed three in Pennsylvania.
Submitted by Laura Miller on
Faced with the nation's growing waistline and flat sales in recent years, fast-food restaurants are relying on new products and PR to help improve their image and their profit. "Mike Donahue, VP, US communications and customer satisfaction for McDonald's, notes that PR pioneered McDonald's integrated marketing push on its salads," PR Week writes. "The company aligned its salads with Paul Newman's Newman's Own brand of salad dressings, offering those dressings for its new product. Newman's Own is highly regarded in the world of natural and organic foods.
Submitted by John Stauber on
"Nissan Motors is planting actors in movie theaters to
perform live commercials before the start of showings of
'The Matrix Revolutions' in an effort to expose jaded,
skeptical consumers to advertising by masking it as
something else. The brief in-person pitches feature actors scattered among
the ticket-buying audience who stand and deliver lines that
evoke the words spoken by poets at events known as slams or
jams. Their performances are timed to accompany a
commercial the audience sees on the movie screen, which
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Recent news reports have heralded a recent jump in the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as signs that the economy is turning around. The question, however is, "Which economy?" While the GDP grew 7.2% last quarter, 146,000 jobs were lost. That's good news for corporate CEOs, but bad news for most of the rest of us. And economists warn that even the boost to the CEO economy is a temporary "sugar high" that won't last once markets respond to tolerate the fiscal recklessness and heavy debt the White House has embraced.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
"Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company's internal communications about its electronic voting machines," reports John Schwartz.
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