When television stations take the "'quick and dirty' route to health news coverage" by airing sponsored videos produced by public relations firms or other companies, it's a real problem, writes journalism professor Gary Schwitzer. For example, Ivanhoe Broadcast News (which was mentioned in the Center for Media and Democracy's "Fake TV News" report) puts out "single source stories with one spokesman from one institution touting one idea," complete with PR contacts. Yet, the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) -- which is supposed to set "standards of newsgathering" -- recently partnered with Ivanhoe. RTNDA's foundation is offering "two new training opportunities for journalists": a three-month internship providing "professional training in health reporting at Ivanhoe headquarters," and a two-week fellowship "to travel to the Ivanhoe headquarters to focus on health and medical reporting." Schwitzer asks, "Why doesn't RTNDA partner with the NIH Medicine in the Media workshop or the MIT Science Journalism Fellowships or with the Association of Health Care Journalists or with [the University of Minnesota's] HealthNewsReview.org project?" RTNDA has sided with the Public Relations Society of America, in opposing attempts to ensure that video news releases are disclosed to news viewers.

Mark PennUntil March 2008, the major public relations firm Burson-Marsteller counted among its clients the Pakistan People's Party, as the Center for Media and Democracy previously reported. Burson-Marsteller promised to influence U.S. policy and public opinion, via contacts with "100 American political journalists and business elites," by favorable "white papers" by academics and op/ed columns in newspapers. The firm also pledged to "promote credible 'third-party' supporters of Pakistan," including "former U.S. government officials," "think tank experts" and influential Pakistani-Americans. The Pakistan lobbying contract, which also involved the polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, specifically mentioned New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria as outreach targets. Luckily for Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton -- whose former campaign strategist, Mark Penn, heads Burson-Marsteller and Penn, Schoen -- the firms' work for Pakistan ended "well before [November's] terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India." Otherwise the Penn-Pakistan connection could have been used by "opposition researchers dredging up tough questions" for Clinton's confirmation hearing.

Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu "seems about as climate friendly as they come," writes Josh Harkinson, but "more industry friendly than his rhetoric suggests." As the director of the Energy Department-funded Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu helped broker "the largest university-industry alliance in U.S. history, the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute." The biofuels research institute involves the Berkeley lab, two public universities and oil giant BP. Chu pitched BP's deal to the UC-Berkeley Academic Senate, one-third of whose members voted against it. Chu also promoted the institute on campus, saying "money" was the only reason more biofuels research wasn't already underway. The university's compromise agreement gave BP half of the seats on the board governing the institute. As Energy Secretary, Chu will likely "face pressure to partner with corporations in pursuing technological solutions to climate change," notes Harkinson. "As the incoming Obama administration prepares to spend liberally to develop cleaner sources of energy, the structure of corporate-government partnerships will determine how the profits of that research return to taxpayers, and how rigorously scientists evaluate the downsides of controversial technologies such as biofuels."

This "Air Force Blog Assessment" chart specifies "rules of engagement" for dealing with bloggers.Viral marketing strategist David Meerman Scott says he was surprised recently to discover that the U.S. Air Force has its own Twitter feed, staffed by Captain David Faggard, who holds the title of Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon.

Scott interviewed Faggard and reports that his team's "mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public." Faggard says the focus is on "Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media)."

In addition to a Twitter feed, Scott reports that

Capt. Faggard writes The Official Blog of the U.S. Air Force; has pages on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook; helps publicize a Second Life area called Huffman Prairie; contributes to iReport (user name USAFPA); and is on Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Newsvine, Reddit. There's Air Force widgets. And there's even a video mashup contest for high schools to show school spirit sponsored by the Air Force.

Other branches of the military are also getting into the social networking game, along with other branches of government. The Army also has its own Twitter feed, as does the Department of Homeland Security, the Bush White House, and the U.S. Joint Forces Command, the U.S. Department of State, and the Israeli Consulate in New York.

Just a few months ago, U.S. military analysts raised concerns that Twitter and other online social networking technologies could become terrorist tools. It appears they've decided that they can be useful for their own purposes as well.

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at an off-key gift, education that doesn't teach and SLAPPed reporters. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," Chip Saltsman. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!

Alan Rusbridger, who edits the British Guardian, thinks fear of libel lawsuits from big corporations may have contributed to journalists' failure to adequately report on the dangerous economic decisions that led to the recent implosion of the global financial system. In an article for the New York Review of Books, he recounts his own paper's "most recent serious brush with the British defamation laws" earlier this year when it was sued for libel by Tesco, one of the largest public companies in Britain and the fourth-largest retailer in the world.

The case centered around a report in the Guardian in which Rusbridger admits that the newspaper got some of its facts wrong. It reported correctly that Tesco was using complex financial deals to avoid paying taxes, but its reporters misunderstood the particulars of the arrangement, and "the sums avoided were much less than we had supposed."

The ensuing libel lawsuit from Tesco consumed more than a million dollars in legal fees, and threatened to go to millions more before it was settled out of court.

People are questioning the propriety of a new TV and Internet ad that resurrects the voice and image of murdered Beatle John Lennon to promote the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation, which supplies durable, low-cost laptop computers to underprivileged children in foreign countries. The ad digitally recreates Lennon's voice, with his bespectacled face appearing to mouth the words, "Imagine every child, no matter where in the world they were, could access a universe of knowledge. They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want. I tried to do it through my music, but now you can do it in a very different way. You can give a child a laptop, and more than imagine, you can change the world." Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, gave permission to use her husband's image free of charge, and the ad was created pro-bono, but still people are finding the idea of manipulating dead celebrities to promote products "creepy" and unsettling. A comment in a Laptop Magazine blog laid out a common opinion of such ads: "What's next? Elvis for peace in Darfur? John Wayne would probably have gotten behind AIDS education and prevention measures ... Where does it end? Why do we need dead people to help us envision a better future? I suppose there's nobody alive that would agree to this? Sad times."

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has put over $176 million into funding abstinence-only sex education programs, a component of which is asking teenagers to take a pledge that they will remain virgins until after marriage. But a recent analysis of data from a large federal survey revealed that over half of youths became sexually active whether or not they took the pledge. The study also found that teens who took the pledge tended to have more negative views of condoms and to use them less. The percentage of teens who did have sex and took precautions against sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers. "This study again raises the issue of why the federal government is continuing to invest in abstinence-only programs," said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

President-elect Barack Obama's close advisers "tend to shudder at any parallels to George W. Bush," writes Mark Leibovich, "but many reporters and rivals have noted the 'Bush-like' tendencies the Obama campaign demonstrated in its ability to control information. The comparison is generally meant as a compliment (albeit a grudging one) by members of the press and expressed enviously by veterans of other campaigns. Plouffe himself admitted to me that the Obama campaign subscribed to the 'Bush model' of communications discipline. Asked if Obama himself spoke of the 'Bush model,' Plouffe told me he did." Like Bush's election campaigns, the Obama campaign's "brain trust was unusually small and close-knit. ... This enabled the Obama team to maintain tight control of its information. They prided themselves on never leaking. ... Obama’s operatives spoke with a single voice and a precise message and only when they wanted to." And, "Like the Bush model, the Obama model also clearly allowed for combat with the press, sometimes extending to punishment." One difference, however, is that Obama plans to maintain a close advisory relationship with his press secretary, Robert Gibbs. Bush, by contrast, kept his press secretaries including Ari Fleischer, Scott McClellan and Tony Snow at arm's length and out of the decision-making loop.

Aside from the recent shoe-tossing incident when Bush visited Iraq, there's hardly any coverage of Iraq anymore, as Megan Garber points out in the Columbia Journalism Review. "Per studies from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the war regularly wins less than two percent of the weekly U.S. news hole," she writes. "And complacency shouldn't keep us from being fairly shocked when, after Iraq's cabinet approved a 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq -- suggesting a measure of resolution to the 'timetable' debate that had been raging in Washington for years, not to mention a de facto end to the war -- the agreement was all but ignored in the media." The problem, she says, is "partially logistical: on-the-ground reporting from the country is both exceptionally expensive ... and incredibly dangerous (Iraq, for the sixth year in a row, has been named the deadliest country in the world for journalists)." As a result, however, the "story of Iraq is, if not fading altogether from our collective consciousness, then at least fading generally from our collective conscience."