Media

Buzz is Dead, Long Live PR

Building "buzz" was the hallmark of dot-com PR, writes Lois Paul of the PR firm of Lois Paul & Associates. Now that the dot-coms have crashed, she says PR must deliver "real messages" and present "real companies, not personalities or 'vision.' ... The best PR people are invaluable to companies during this type of downturn," she says, because "PR today is all about reputation management."

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The Web Never Forgets

Government agencies have tried to remove sensitive information from the internet, only to discover that copies have proliferated and they're virtually impossible to eradicate. Copies of supposedly eradicated reports and documents can be found using common search engines and the Internet Archive's whimsically named Wayback Machine, a digital archive of Internet sites that makes it possible to visit web pages even after they have been deleted or changed.

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Let's Not Talk About Arsenic

Newspapers in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Boston, including chains owned by the publishers of The Wall Street Journal and the Boston Herald, are refusing to carry a paid advertisement criticizing retail giant Home Depot for selling lumber treated with dangerous amounts of arsenic, according to a news release from the Healthy Building Network and the Environmental Working Group.

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TV Morning Shows Called "Sophisticated Infomercials"

Katie Couric of "Today," Diane Sawyer of "Good Morning America," and Bryant Gumbel of "The Early Show" are three of the nation's biggest media stars. But are they journalists or glorified hawkers? According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which studied the three network morning shows for two weeks in June and two weeks in October, these programs spend an awful lot of time selling things to the public. ... Even given some slight moderation after the Sept. 11 attacks, the report suggested that the shows were becoming a "kind of sophisticated infomercial."

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Clinton Speaks, Pundits Spin

On November 7, former President Bill Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University on foreign policy and globalization in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Within 24 hours, Clinton's words had been twisted into the nonsensical allegation that the former president had blamed slavery and America's treatment of Native Americans for the attacks.

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What the Muslim World Is Watching

Apparently Muslims have learned a thing or two from America after all, according to Fouad Ajami, who complains that the Al Jazeera television network is guilty of "the Hollywoodization of news ... with an abandon that would make the Fox News Channel blush." Ajami notes that "Al Jazeera's reporters and editors have no qualms about challenging the wisdom of today's Arab rulers. Indeed, Al Jazeera has been rebuked by the governments of Libya and Tunisia for giving opposition leaders from those countries significant air time.

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Corporate Advertisers Dictate News Content

How much is your local TV news influenced by the people who buy ads? In a survey of 118 news directors around the country, more than half, 53 percent, reported that advertisers pressure them to kill negative stories or run positive ones. The pressure to do puff pieces about sponsors occurs "constantly," "all the time," "everyday," "routinely," and "every time a sales person opened his/her mouth," news directors reported.

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Victory on TV

TV news crews that followed Northern Alliance forces into Kabul mostly provided celebratory coverage of victorious soldiers waving, crowds of people celebrating in the streets, and men defiantly shaving their beards. For the correspondents on the ground, however, the mood was less euphoric. "You can't trust anybody you see with a gun," said NBC news director David Verdi. "You just don't know. It's really like the wild, wild West.

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