Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
No public relations agency in America benefited more from the Internet boom than Middleberg & Associates. By the year 2000, Middleberg had established itself as the authority on online media relations, but the dot-com meltdown also means leaner times for its PR firms. Last week, agency founder Don Middleberg closed the firm
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Many web surfers rely on for-profit search engines and web directories like Yahoo to guide them to news items of interest. When FAIR scrutinized Yahoo!'s daily journalism site, however, it found a serious lack of diversity. Of 21 columnists in the Yahoo! News Op/Ed section, 62 percent are conservatives, 14 percent are centrists, and 24 percent are progressives. 67 percent are male, 90 percent are white, and not one progressive person of color is a contributor. Additionally, five of the seven female columnists are conservatives.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Channel One, which beams TV news programs and commercials into thousands of schools in the U.S., has broadcast dozens of news segments which contained anti-drug messages in the past three years -- and received millions of dollars' worth of ad credits from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy for doing so.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
FitzGerald Communications, which rode the high-tech wave, has established a "special situations" group to handle corporate messes such as accounting irregularities, management shake-ups, class action suits and bankruptcies. The unit is headed by Nicole Russell, a former employee of Hill and Knowlton, where she served as spokesperson for Sunbeam during the "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap days and Cendant, victim of the largest accounting fraud in history.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Nike has created a website offering an online virtual tour of one of its factories in Vietnam, claiming that the tour demonstrates its commitment to continuous improvement in labor practices overseas. A year in the making, the video depicts a clean, well-run factory where workers are well-treated. But according to Jason Mark, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Global Exchange, a labor rights group, "It seems more like a publicity stunt than a genuine effort to make systematic changes across the board.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
In a major surrender to Israeli diplomatic pressure, BBC officials in London have banned their staff in Britain and the Middle East from referring to Israel's policy of murdering its guerrilla opponents as "assassination." BBC reporters have been told that in future they are to use Israel's own euphemism for the murders, calling them "targeted killings."
Submitted by Laura Miller on
Media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting reports in the latest issue of their magazine Extra! that media citations of think tanks grew 29 percent in 2000. Progressive groups, like the Economic Policy Institute, Urban Institute, and Justice Policy Institute, saw a significant increase in references to them in electronic media. Conservative and right-leaning think tanks, however, still got half of all media citations.
Submitted by Laura Miller on
The San Francisco Independent Media Center reports that in response to escalating police sweeps and media vilification of homeless people, protesters plastered the front doors of the San Francisco Chronicle offices with copies of biased news coverage taken from the Chronicle's own pages and demanded an end to an editorial policy that is aiding and abetting the harassment and criminalization of homeless people.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
In a case with implications for investigative journalism in the Internet age, a Canadian mining company has successfully used British libel law to shut down part of a U.S.-based Web site.
Submitted by Laura Miller on
In a recent memo titled "Talking to the Press," Polk Laffoon, Knight Ridders's VP for corporate relations, laid out some media relations "rules of thumb" for the company's executives, publishers, and editors. In the memo, which was leaked to the Philadelphia Weekly, Laffoon writes: "Reporters who want to do take-outs on the company virtually always have an agenda. If the agenda isn't friendly (often the case), we muster whatever facts and figures we can to refute or blunt it. Although it would be rare that a reporter changes the agenda based on what we say, we can have an impact.
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