Corporations

"Federal officials have softened a national advertising
campaign to promote breastfeeding after complaints from two
companies that make infant formula, according to several
doctors and nurses who are helping the government with the
effort. After the two companies [Mead Johnson and Abbott] and the top officials of the American Academy of Pediatrics complained to federal health
officials, the government decided to eliminate spots
discussing the risk of leukemia and diabetes in babies not

Commercial Alert and prominent psychology experts sent a letter today to Emory University President James Wagner, requesting that Emory stop conducting neuromarketing experiments on human subjects. Neuromarketing is a controversial new field of marketing that maps the brain's activation responses in order prod desires for particular products.

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.

"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.