In the news
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* Planners of Scandal-Plagued Medicare Part D Legislation Now Fighting Health Insurance Reform Former federal officials and legislative aides who helped draft the 2003 Medicare Part D drug benefit are now lobbying for pharmaceutical interests trying and protect the lucrative drug payment system in health care reform negotiations. In 2008, the House Committee on Oversight found that Medicare Part D had delivered a bonanza to pharmaceutical companies by allowing them to charge the government 30 percent more for drugs through Part D than for drugs for people in the Medicaid system. Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists are working against the House version of the health care reform bill, which requires drug companies give up some of their Medicare Part D windfall. The list of public officials-turned-health care-lobbyists includes former Senator John Breaux (D-Louisiana), who fought against allowing the government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare Part D, former Senator Don Nickles (R-Oklahoma) who helped negotiate the final version of Part D and then left to form his own lobbying firm, and Thomas A. Scully, the former head of Medicare, who also helped design Part D.
- Hill & Knowlton's Carbon Two-Step In a media release, the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton (H&K) boasts that the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has awarded the company a short-term consultancy for "an information campaign to encourage climate conscious behavior by delegates and others to help reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions" related to the COP15 meeting in Copenhagen in December. H&K's global Chairman & CEO, Paul Taaffe, states that "climate change is the world’s #1 issue and a huge and complex challenge for us all." The release also points out that the PR firm is "a pro bono advisor to the Iwokrama rainforest trust in Guyana." What it doesn't state is that the firm also works for some of the world's largest carbon emitters such as Huaneng Power International, a subsidiary of the Chinese government-owned China Huaneng Group.
- Cap and Trade Research Paper Gagged The Australian government's peak scientific research body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), has suppressed a research paper by one of its own environmental economists because it is critical of the design of the proposed "cap and trade" greenhouse gas emissions reduction scheme. A paper by Dr. Clive Spash had been accepted for publication by the journal, New Political Economy. However, CSIRO managers wrote to the editor insisting that it not be published. In his paper, Dr. Spash warned that the design of emission trading schemes were skewed to favour vested interests rendering them economically inefficient. Australian business reporter Nicola Berkovic reports that Dr. Spash argued that in Australia "large polluters would be compensated with free permits while smaller, more competitive firms would have to buy theirs at auction" and that "carbon offsets bought from other countries were of dubious value; and the schemes "crowded out" voluntary action by individuals." The chief executive of the CSIRO, Dr. Megan Clark, is currently considering whether publication of the paper can proceed or not. Clark previously worked as a senior executive with two major mining companies, BHP-Billiton and Western Mining Corporation.
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Recent blogs on PR Watch
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Editor's pick of the week
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Another one of the groups spearheading opposition to proposals to reform the U.S. healthcare system is Conservatives for Patients Rights, headed by Richard Scott. Part of the group's anti-government healthcare campaign are television ads that feature "tragic stories" of Canadian and British residents who allegedly suffered long waits for surgeries, couldn't get the drugs they needed, or had to come to the United States for treatment. CPR was one of the groups that worked to get people to turn out to town hall meetings nationally to protest health care reform. Read more about the group here.
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Projects for citizen editors
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Drilling Through the Appalachian Shale Gas Hype While the U.S. economy continues to reel from the fallout from the global financial crisis, there's a boom on in the gas industry wanting access to Appalachian areas underlain by Marcellus Shale deposits. The prospect of massive drilling has environmentalists and many residents worried about the environmental impacts. To make gas production profitable, the industry employs a practice called fracking, pumping large volumes of water, sand and a mix of chemicals down drill holes to fracture the rock formations and increase the volume of accessible gas. The Safe Drinking Water Act protects water supplies, but the gas industry is the only industry excluded from the legislation, and many state governments fail to regulate fracking practices. You can help out by adding information about the health and environmental effects being seen from fracking to the SourceWatch article on fracking.
If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here, here, here and here. Hold onto your hat, have fun, and thanks for your help!
And if you would like to work on something else, take a look at some of our earlier citizen journalism projects here.
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Popular articles over the last week
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The most popular pages over the last week have included the article on Fox News, the cable channel owned by news magnate Rupert Murdoch. Other popular pages include the article on Propaganda techniques, which describes common strategic and rhetorical techniques often used to influence opinions and avoid the truth. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, think tanks, Xe (the company formerly known as Blackwater) have also been popular this week.
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What they're saying about SourceWatch
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"The folks at the Center for Media and Democracy have done incredible work documenting fake grassroots ("astroturf") groups. Here, they're helping protects the rights of all Americans to exercise their right to vote. They are completely non-partisan. These guys are the real deal." Craig Newmark, Craig's List
"A truly impressive project based on cutting edge web technology." David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
"The troublemakers at the Center for Media and Democracy, for example, point to dozens of examples of "greenwashing," which they defined as the "unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government or even a non-government organization to sell a product, a policy" or rehabilitate an image. In the center's view, many enterprises labeled green don't deserve the name.—Jack Shafer, "Green Is the New Yellow: On the excesses of 'green' journalism", Slate, July 6, 2007.
"As a journalist frequently on the receiving end of various PR campaigns, some of them based on disinformation, others front groups for undisclosed interests, [CMD's SourceWatch] is an invaluable resource."—Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire
"Thanks for all your help. There's no way I could have done my piece on big PR and global warming without the CMD [Center for Media and Democracy] and your fabulous websites."—Zoe Cormier, journalist, Canada
"The dearth of information on the [U.S.] government [lobbying] disclosure forms about the other business-backed coalitions comes in stark contrast to the data about them culled from media reports, websites, press releases and Internal Revenue Service documents and posted by SourceWatch, a website that tracks advocacy groups." Jeanne Cummings, 'New disclosure reports lack clarity", Politico, April 29, 2008.
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