Penn Pushed on His Losing Campaign
Submitted by Bob Burton on
Mark Penn, the CEO of the global PR firm Burson-Marsteller, recently spoke at a corporate conference in the UK promoting his book Microtrends.
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Public Relations
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffrey, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard
What will it take, for the Defense Department officials involved to be held responsible for an illegal government propaganda campaign? Why don't news professionals realize that they need to vet their commentators and disclose any potential conflicts of interest to their audiences? When will the cable and network television stations that featured the Pentagon's pundits tell viewers that their war commentary was anything but independent?
An in-depth article on one of 75 retired military officers covertly cultivated by the Pentagon to be its "message force multipliers" recently raised these questions yet again. Retired general, NBC News analyst and industry consultant Barry McCaffrey is a prime example of "a deeply opaque world," where "privileged access to senior government officials" and "war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests," writes New York Times reporter David Barstow.
Fake Drug News Online, Without Risk Information
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
A consumer group filed a complaint against the medical device company Medtronic, because an online video promoting one of the company's products "did not make consumers aware of the risks, warnings, precautions or side effects" associated with the product. The video, which was posted to the YouTube website, was produced for Medtronic by the broadcast PR firm VNR-1 Communications.
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Bush: Remember What I Say, Not What I Did
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Wondering what former Bush advisor Karl Rove and former public diplomacy czar Karen Hughes have been up to lately?
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Bell's Belarus: Never Mind Its Human Rights Record
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
With help from British public relations guru Lord Timothy Bell and his firm, Bell Pottinger, the country of Belarus -- where "opposition protests are regularly crushed with overwhelming force by riot police" and the domestic spy agency is still called the KGB -- is getting an image make-over.
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Grassfire's Blitzkrieg of Fear Aimed at President-Elect Obama
Submitted by John Stauber on
Analyst Meg White examines the "blitzkrieg of fear mongering and misinformation" being whipped up against President-elect Barack Obama. "One phalanx in the fight belongs to Grassfire.org. ... Grassfire sent out an e-mail designed to scare people into joining its 'army that is ready to take on Obama's agenda.' ...
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Science Reporting by Press Release
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Science reporting "is more and more the direct product of PR shops," according to Charles Petit, a veteran science reporter who runs MIT’s online Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
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Medialink's Books Awash with Red Ink
Submitted by Bob Burton on
In its latest quarterly financial report to the U.S.
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How David Axelrod May Be Like Karl Rove
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"If David Axelrod decides to join the Obama White House, he'll ... have to take an enormous pay cut and possibly reveal the extent of his lucrative corporate public relations work," reports Politico.
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War and Deceptive Spinning Are Over... Not
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"Public relations firms across the country predict massive layoffs in the coming months due to recent legislation outlawing the firms' most lucrative practices," according to an article in a spoof edition of the New York Times, dated July 4, 2009. The real Times reports, "In an elaborate hoax, pranksters distributed thousands of copies ...
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