Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
The White House is marking "this Friday's first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with a week-long media blitz arguing that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was essential to combating global terrorism and making the United States safer." Another goal is to set "realistic expectations" for the rebuilding of Iraq.
Submitted by Laura Miller on
The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq has selected British PR firm Bell Pottinger Communications to promote the establishment of democracy, according to PR trade publication the Holmes Report.
Submitted by John Stauber on
"When David Kay, the CIA's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, announced earlier this year that his team had found no stockpiled weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he touched off an explosion of blame, finger-pointing, denial, and hasty 'clarifications' about the extent and accuracy of the intelligence that the Bush Administration used to buttress its decision to invade Iraq. Kay's startling conclusion, though, came as no surprise to many analysts in the U.S.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
The Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland has published a new study on "Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction," and the picture isn't pretty. "Most media outlets represented WMD as a monolithic menace, failing to adequately distinguish between weapons programs and actual weapons or to address the real differences among chemical, biological, nuclear, and radiological weapons," the report states.
Submitted by Laura Miller on
"Halliburton, which according to its just-released 10-K report has earned $85 million on $3.6 billion in Iraqi work last year, has not yet paid the subcontractor that prepared the Thanksgiving Day photo-op of President George Bush serving the troops dinner in Baghdad International Airport," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Britons continue to debate the Blair government's now-discredited claim that Iraq was 45 minutes away from launching chemical or biological weapons. Glenn Frankel and Rajiv Chandrasekaran British review in detail the history of the 45-minute claim and Blair's failure to "disclose that the claim had come secondhand from a single, uncorroborated source, and that some of the government's own experts believed it was questionable."
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
In a sign of "close tactical coordination with the White House" and "at a time when Sen John Kerry has surged ahead of Bush in the presidential popularity polls," Republican Senators planned a surprise debate on Iraq today. Majority Leader Bill Frist and Jon Kyl are leading the estimated six-hour rebuttal of Democratic criticisms.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
"Found: A Smoking Gun," declared the headline by New York Times columnist William Safire, which claimed that a "clear link" had recently been found between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But what did Safire base his case-closed pronouncement upon? A New York Times story that had appeared a day earlier. But the original Times story reached the opposite conclusion from Safire, stating that the recent discover not evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam.
Submitted by John Stauber on
"The chief executive of the Halliburton Company, Dave Lesar,
never imagined that he would be the star of his own
television commercial. But there he is, on the airwaves in
Washington and Houston, assuring viewers that his company
has billions of dollars in contracts to rebuild Iraq and
feed American troops 'because of what we know, not who we
know.' The unnamed 'who' is, of course, Vice President Dick
Cheney, Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000. ... The advertising, Mr. Lesar added, will continue until the
Submitted by John Stauber on
"If you are a 'metrosexual,' you might also be into 'manscaping.' If you're a 'flexitarian,' no doubt you've tried 'tofurkey. These are among the top words of 2003, so named by the American Dialect Society at its annual conference in Boston recently. To translate: 'metrosexual,' the winner of 'the word or phrase which most colored the nation's language,' is a fashion-conscious heterosexual male, preoccupied with money, clothes and style, and 'manscaping' is male body-shaving.
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