Sheldon Rampton's News Articles

Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law

by Sheldon Rampton — April 28, 2008 - 7:04pm
  • Topics: Pundits, Third Party Technique, Democracy, Ethics, Media, Propaganda, Secrecy, U.S. Government, War / Peace

    • The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week's exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress."

    As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, "publicity or propaganda" is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) "covert propaganda." By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

    This Earth Day, Let's Scrape off the Greenwash

    by Sheldon Rampton — April 22, 2008 - 1:18am
  • Topics: Activism, Front Groups, Global Warming, Corporations, Environment, Health, Public Relations, Science

    • The Rainforest Action Network takes on greenwashing by BP

    Today marks the 38th annual celebration of Earth Day, and once again the event comes with its fair share of PR hype and misleading marketing campaigns. In the spirit of dedicating ourselves to genuine concern for the planet, today is therefore a good time to look carefully at corporate environmental claims, some of which consist more of empty rhetoric than real substance.

    Companies like Wal-Mart are announcing environmental initiatives. General Electric has its "Ecomagnation" advertising campaign. In Singapore, a shopping center is advertising that customers can "shop to save planet earth" -- and if they buy enough, they might win a new car!

    The ritual of green hypocrisy frequently requires that companies and politicians redefine environmental progress in increasingly creative ways. Last week, for example, George W. Bush announced a plan to address the problem of global warming by "halting the growth" of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2025. Beyond the fact that this target date is 17 years in the future, what really means is that during those 17 years not only will greenhouse gas emissions continue, the amount of those emissions will continue to grow. As columnist Gail Collins observed in the New York Times, this would be akin to having an overweight person announce a plan to achieve "an 18 percent reduction in the rate at which he was gaining weight, to be reached within the next decade."

    War? What War?

    by Sheldon Rampton — April 3, 2008 - 8:30am
  • Topics: Internet, Journalism, Iraq

    • "Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet," observes New York Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña. "Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism."

    The past week saw a dramatic escalation in violence in Iraq and rising civilian deaths, prompting analysts to warn that "Iraqis may be about to witness a new phase in the cycle of violence ... intra-Shi'ite bloodletting that could tear Iraq apart and more deeply embroil U.S. forces." But even these developments have barely cast a media ripple.

    The Iraq war has also been losing ground for attention on the internet, according to a recent report which shows that "the war in Iraq continues to decline in search interest, down 120 percent over the past three and a half years," while interest turns to topics such as Paris Hilton, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, Heath Ledger and the latest YouTube video.

    It's Our Web (If We Can Keep It)

    by Sheldon Rampton — December 5, 2007 - 12:27am
  • Topics: Activism, Internet, Corporations

    • Free Speech TV has launched the "It's Our Web" campaign, featuring a a short, entertaining animation explaining the dangers of media centralization and suggesting positive alternatives.

    "This is a truly pivotal time for the Internet, the most powerful and interactive medium humans have ever seen," says Steve Anderson, who produced the video. "New commercial incursions by big online media enterprises, including the widely disdained "Facebook Beacon," make explicit what new media giants have been doing quietly for some time; searching for new and evermore effective ways to sell our attention, our clicks and our private information to advertisers and marketers."

    Shared Values Revisited

    by Sheldon Rampton — October 17, 2007 - 6:17pm
  • Topics: Advertising, Terrorism, International, Propaganda, Religion

    • I received a request recently from a university professor who teaches a course about media literacy. She was wondering if I could help her find videos of the "Shared Values" television ads that the U.S. Department of State produced to improve the image of the United States in Muslim countries shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, so she could show them to her students.

    A Black Day for Yellow Journalism

    by Sheldon Rampton — July 13, 2007 - 3:42pm
  • Topics: Right Wing, Pundits, Corporations, Media, Think Tanks

    • Former media mogul Conrad Black has been convicted by a Chicago jury of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice and could face up to 35 years in prison for looting his former company, Hollinger International, of tens of millions of dollars.

    Before his downfall, Black was a smaller-scale version of Fox-TV owner Rupert Murdoch, building a media empire that he used to inject his right-wing views into U.S., Canadian, British and Australian politics. He pumped money into the pockets of the neoconservative pundits who helped sell the war in Iraq and gave them prominent voice in his own newspapers.

    More on "Strange Culture"

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 29, 2007 - 2:19pm
  • Topics: Activism, Genetic Engineering, Arts / Culture, Human Rights


    • I've been asked how people can find the movie, "Strange Culture," the documentary about the trial of artist-activist Steve Kurtz that I described in my blog post earlier this week. The director of the film, Lynn Hershman Leeson, has her own website as well as a separate movie website, which includes sales and exhibition information. YouTube also has a brief video that features interviews with Kurtz and the director, as well as the movie trailer.

    Strange Culture

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 25, 2007 - 8:11pm
  • Topics: Genetic Engineering, Arts / Culture, Terrorism, Human Rights

    • Eduardo Kac's "GFP Bunny"
    Slate magazine has an online slide show this week about "bio art" — in which people use genetic manipulation to insert coded messages into DNA, or produce a transgenic rabbit using a gene derived from a jellyfish that makes it glow fluorescent green.

    I was a little disappointed, though, that Slate failed to mention the work of Steve Kurtz, a bio artist whose work goes further than most in provoking debate about the ethical issues involved with genetic engineering — so far, in fact, that he is currently awaiting trial on charges that could land him in prison for 20 years.

    Has the Internet Changed the Propaganda Model?

    by Sheldon Rampton — May 22, 2007 - 1:50pm
  • Topics: Activism, Internet, Iraq, Democracy, Human Rights, International, Media, Politics, Propaganda, U.S. Government

    • In their groundbreaking 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, professors Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky not only explained, but documented with extensive case studies, how mass media and public opinion are shaped in a democracy. Twenty years later, can their "propaganda model" still be used to explain modern media distortions? That was one of the main questions discussed last week at a conference in Windsor, Ontario, titled "20 Years of Propaganda?" Organized by Dr. Paul Boin, the conference drew hundreds of scholars and activists including myself, and more than 1,000 people attended a closing speech by Chomsky on May 17.

    Shaping the Message, Distorting the Science

    by Sheldon Rampton — March 27, 2007 - 2:13pm
  • Topics: Global Warming, U.S. Congress, Lobbying, Marketing, Public Relations, Science, Tobacco

    • I've been asked to deliver testimony this Wednesday before the Committee on Science and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is holding a hearing titled "Shaping the Message, Distorting the Science: Media Strategies to Influence Science Policy."

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