Anne Landman's News Articles

The Right Wing's Next Target: The Greenlining Institute

by Anne Landman — May 17, 2010 - 10:34pm
  • Topics: Activism, Banking, Human Rights

    • Last year, right-wing activists masqueraded as a pimp and a prostitute and used a phony storyline and a hidden camera to take down the community group ACORN. ACORN was eventually absolved and the unsavory tactics of the right exposed, but that hasn't stopped the right from moving on to a new target: the Berkeley, California-based Greenlining Institute. Like ACORN, the Greenlining Institute is a progressive organization that advocates for the poor and works for economic justice. It also supports implementation and enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, a federal law passed in 1977 to mitigate deteriorating conditions in low and moderate-income neighborhoods by addressing the practice of redlining -- denying credit or insurance to people based on their ethnic background or neighborhood. Groups like ACORN and the Greenlining Institute draw the wrath of wealthy corporate interests because they seek government regulation of lucrative but abusive or harmful business practices.

    How Much Oil Is Really Spilling into the Gulf of Mexico?

    by Anne Landman — May 13, 2010 - 11:43am
  • Topics: Crisis Management, Corporations, Environment

    • Map of Gulf spill on May 8, with fishing closure areaAt first, right after the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded on April 20, BP and U.S. government officials reported the underwater well was pumping about 1,000 barrels a day into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A few days later, that figure was challenged by the non-profit group SkyTruth, which uses remote sensing and digital mapping to evaluate environmental issues globally. Ten days later, by April 30, some industry experts said the well could be leaking at a rate of 5,000 barrels daily -- five times the previous estimate, and the one that has been the most widely and persistently used in the media.

    Wildly Disparate Estimates

    But estimates continue to change. On May 4th, BP executives in a closed-door meeting reportedly told Congress that the well is discharging anywhere from 5,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf per day. At 42 U.S. gallons per barrel, that means the spill could be growing by 210,000 to 2.52 million gallons of oil each day. But how much is that, really?

    NPR Erases Domestic Terrorism

    by Anne Landman — May 11, 2010 - 3:05pm
  • Topics: Journalism, Terrorism, Propaganda

    • National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast a story on May 9 by Dina Temple-Raston titled Terrorism in the U.S. Takes on a U.K. Pattern that started out with the following flawed premise:

    BP's "Beyond Petroleum" Campaign Losing its Sheen

    by Anne Landman — May 3, 2010 - 1:31pm
  • Topics: Advertising, Corporations, Environment

    • Back in July, 2000, British Petroleum launched a high-profile, $200 million public relations ad campaign designed by Ogilvy & Mather to position the company as environmentally-friendly. The company introduced a new slogan, "Beyond Petroleum," and changed its 70 year-old, sheild-style logo to a new, cheerful green and yellow sunburst. To many, the "Beyond Petroleum" campaign has always been ludicrous. After all, not only did it pitch BP's smallest energy sector while ignoring its major one, but BP's investment in extractive oil operations dwarfed its investment in renewable energy. BP spent a mere $45 million in 1999 to buy a solar energy company called Solarex -- a microscopic acquisition compared to the $26.5 billion it invested to buy ARCO to expand its oil drilling portfolio. BP is also the company behind the environmentally controversial (and some would say disastrous) oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. Now, in the wake of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP's greenwashing campaign looks even less slick. The company's hypocrisy and greenwashing have risen to the surface, and are spreading uncontrollably.

    Op-Ed

    Why Facts No Longer Matter

    by Anne Landman — April 28, 2010 - 1:04pm
  • Topics: Corporate Campaigns, Cause-Related Marketing, Politics

    • A recent PRWatch story discussed how corporations are increasingly turning to cause marketing to get around people's ability to tune out their daily deluge of advertising. Cause marketing, or "affinity marketing," is a sophisticated public relations strategy in which a corporation allies itself with a cause that evokes strong emotions in targeted consumers, like curing cancer, alleviating poverty, feeding the hungry, helping the environment or saving helpless animals. The relationship avails the company of a more effective way to grab the attention of their audience, by telling them compelling stories linked to the cause, for example tales of survival, loss, strength, good works, etc. Once the company gets your attention, it links its name and brands to the positive emotions generates by the cause. The company then leverages that emotion to get you to buy the stuff they've linked to the cause -- and improve its corporate image.

    Cause marketing works, which is why its use is spreading like wildfire. The operative word that the whole idea turns on is "emotion," because the ability to manipulate people depends completely on generating an emotional connection that the company can exploit.

    Can Eating Junk Food Cure Breast Cancer?

    by Anne Landman — April 21, 2010 - 2:12pm

    When a company promotes pink-ribboned products and claims to care about breast cancer while also selling products linked to disease or injury, it's called pinkwashing, and it's has taken some pretty outrageous forms in the last few years. Ford, Mercedes and BMW have all urged people to buy and drive cars in the name of breast cancer, but exhaust from internal combustion engines contains toxic chemicals linked to disease. The Yoplait yogurt company sold pink-lidded yogurt to raise money for breast cancer, while manufacturing products with milk from cows stimulated by the artificial hormone RBGH, which studies show increases the risk of breast cancer. (Some yogurt companies, including Yoplait, have stopped using RGBH.) There's even a breast cancer awareness gun, and we thought that took the cake.

    Will the Real Tea Party Movement Please Stand Up?

    by Anne Landman — April 19, 2010 - 2:31pm

    Have you wondered how the Tea Party, portrayed as a "grassroots" movement, could possibly raise enough money in one year to procure a professionally-painted, luxury motor coach and send it on two highly-publicized national tours? Or how the Tea Party so quickly developed the expertise to plan, organize and execute the tours, and consistently draw major media attention to them?

    The answer is that the Tea Party Express is not a "grassroots" effort. The Web site Politico.com obtained and posted a proposal (pdf) showing that long-time Republican party operatives are, in fact, directing the "Tea Party Express" portion of the movement. The "group" and its activities are the result of efforts by a Republican-affiliated political consulting and public relations firm, Russo Marsh & Rogers, based in Sacramento, California. PR executive Sal Russo of Russo, Marsh & Rogers is also the chief strategist for the Our Country Deserves Better, political action committee (PAC) formed in 2008 to oppose then-candidate Barack Obama.

    Chamber Publicizes Bogus Poll

    by Anne Landman — April 16, 2010 - 3:29pm
  • Topics: Right Wing, Lobbying, Media, Politics, Propaganda

    • The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is publicizing a set of state-level polls that they claim show that "voters overwhelmingly oppose the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency," a component of financial reform legislation set to be debated next week in the House of Representatives. The survey polled 500 voters each in Nebraska and Arkansas, and was performed by the polling firm Ayres McHenry & Associates. Previous polls done by Ayres McHenry for the Chamber have been deemed unreliable by the New York Times, and not up to their standards for publication.

    Marketing to Distrust

    by Anne Landman — April 14, 2010 - 9:05am

    Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, Monsanto, Blackwater, Bank of America, Citigroup, Cigna, Aetna, Enron, Arthur Andersen, Mercury Insurance, Philip Morris ...These are just a few corporate names that engender feelings of distrust, anger and betrayal. They represent scandals, greed, blatant disregard for public welfare, lavish spending of taxpayer money and other negatives, and serve as reminders about how corporate wrongdoing has brought shame on our country and harmed millions.

    But as the public grows more distrustful of big corporations, corporations are fighting back by evolving more clever and sophisticated forms of public relations. Their goal? To manipulate public attitudes and assure that widespread negative feelings don't block their ability to do business. Increasingly, corporations are engaging in variations on the theme of "corporate social responsibility," to try and persuade us that they can be trusted again.

    Media Feeds Americans Fake News About Afghanistan

    by Anne Landman — April 5, 2010 - 2:43pm
  • Topics: Afghanistan, Journalism, Ethics, International, Propaganda, U.S. Government

    • Glen Greenwald of Salon.com reports that Americans are being fed false and misleading "news" about the U.S. war in Afghanistan because major American media outlets, like the New York Times and CNN, publish propagandized Pentagon accounts of the violence and killing occurring there, without questioning the information they are fed.

    An egregious example of this occurred on February 12, 2010, when NATO's joint international force issued a press release that bore the headline Joint Force Operating In Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery. The release said that after "intelligence confirmed militant activity" in a compound near a village in Paktiya province, an international security force entered the compound and engaged "several insurgents" in a fire fight. Two "insurgents" were killed, the report said, and after the joint forces entered the compound, they "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed."

    But an Afghan news report about the same incident differed wildly.

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