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Features > October 17, 2003

PR Watch Has Its Eyes Open

By Joel Bleifuss

Ten years ago John Stauber decided to take on the media arm of corporate America: the public relations industry. From his home in Madison, Wisconsin, he founded PR Watch, a quarterly magazine that tracked the machinations of the hired guns who stealthily attempt to manage public perception and thereby shape public policy.

Today, PR Watch has grown into an institution that, in addition to putting out the magazine, has an active Web presence (www.prwatch.org) and an annual budget of $200,000, which comes from grants, donations, subscriptions and profits from the four books Stauber and his colleague Sheldon Rampton have written. Their most recent, Weapons of Mass Deception, which was excerpted in the September 1 In These Times, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for the past seven weeks, despite the fact that the only mainstream review it received was in the San Francisco Chronicle.

On the Web, Stauber and Rampton continue to unmask deception in a daily feature, “Spin of the Day.” On October 15, for example, they reported that Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi who helped in the so called “rescue” of Jessica Lynch, received a $300,000 advance from Harper Collins for his new book, Because Each Life is Precious: Why an Iraqi Man Came to Risk Everything for Pvt. Jessica Lynch. In addition to the book contract from a company owned by Rupert Murdoch, Rehaief was given asylum in the United States and a job at the D.C. lobbying firm the Livingston Group. His book is being promoted by his Livingston Group colleague Lauri Fitz-Pegado, who is infamous for her work at Hill & Knowlton PR in 1990 coaching the Kuwaiti girl called “Nayirah” in her shocking but phony testimony to Congress that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies.

Stauber measures success in part from the phone calls he and Rampton receive from reporters who read their first book, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, while in journalism school. “Our work has helped to highlight the extent to which the mainstream corporate media passes on public relations as news,” says Stauber. “About 40 percent of what they read, see or hear in the mainstream media is a result of government or corporate public relations campaigns. What we are seeing is a continuation of a very bad trend. As magazines and newspapers and TV networks and stations downsize journalists, they are not reducing news coverage, they are just using more public relations and passing it off as news.”
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the "10 Most Censored Stories" than any other journalist.

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  • Reader Comments

    Yeah, that so called rescue of that girl was soooo stupid. They should send that Mohammed idiot back to Iraq.

    Posted by Chet on Oct 21, 2003 at 12:08 PM

    I find the whole PR-corporate-media machine somewhat dangerous, especially in a climate where people : will believe anything they’re told, won’t raise a dissenting voice for fear of being labeled unpatriotic, allow their Constitutionally-protected rights to be stripped from them, and won’t make it clear to the media that this is not the kind of coverage we demand as citizens and “consumers” of media.

    We’ve got 10,000 decent writers out here who can’t even get their manuscripts *looked at* by publishers, and all it takes is one Jessica Lynch or some idiotic guy going over Niagara Falls, and the book and movie deals are forthcoming.  That’s the kind of country we live in.

    Posted by Aine on Oct 23, 2003 at 10:44 AM

    RE the comment on the rescue of the girl - Chet, get a clue dude. Read about what happened and how totally unnecessary the whole charade was. PR down to its empty soul.

    I teach Joel Bleifuss’ article on Pusztai, the genetic engineer, as a way in to talking about GE Food in my community college English class. He’s terrific. And of course Stauber is also wonderful: he writes in English that ordinary people can understand AND he nails the Bush PR weirdness dead on.

    Posted by rabbit on Apr 29, 2004 at 11:32 PM

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