PRW Staff's News Articles

The cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy -- where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision -- investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

On Monday, January 17, over one hundred brave souls trudged through several inches of Wisconsin snow to see Wendell Potter, Center for Media and Democracy's (CMD) Senior Fellow on Health Care, visit Madison's Goodman Community Center as part of his cross-country tour signing Deadly Spin: An insurance company insider speaks out on how corporate PR is killing health care and deceiving Am

The Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch is launching a free seminar series for spin-watchers like you. Our first one was scheduled for this week, and was going to focus on the new vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court and what it means for everyday people who are concerned about the Citizens United decision and its aftermath.

This audio seminar was canceled due to unforeseen technical/logistical problems.

In the future, we plan to provide an opportunity to:

• Find out insider details about choosing and confirming a lifetime appointee to the Court.
• Learn about how the next justice may influence legal policies you care about.
• Ask Lisa your questions about the Supreme Court and Citizens United.
• Hear about ways to join the fight against corporations controlling our democracy.

CMD's new Executive Director, Lisa Graves, previously served as the Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, working with the White House on judicial selection in the Clinton Administration. Her plain-spoken but deeply researched analysis of public policy issues has been featured on CNN, Free Speech TV, and Democracy Now! and credited in the New York Times, The Nation, The Progressive, and Vanity Fair and by numerous journalists over the past decade.

Facebook might be selling you out to the government.

With the help of the University of California Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents from the government about how they monitor and use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn to gather information for investigations. The EFF struck gold with this request, as both the IRS and the Department of Justice released training presentations on social networking sites. While this may seem benign, the training material from the DOJ suggests that feds go undercover on sites such as Facebook to gather information on crime.

The DOJ slide show presentation (pdf) also discusses how cooperative these social networking sites are in complying with requests for private data. For example, Facebook, a highly popular social networking site, was described as "often cooperative with emergency requests," while Twitter was less cooperative because they refused to preserve data without legal process.