the mobius strip

Industry closes anti-coal website - National - smh.com.au

THE mining industry has used copyright laws to close an anti-mining website launched by a small protest group in Newcastle.

The NSW Minerals Council has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a TV, print and billboard advertising campaign and launched a website extolling the virtues of mining. The campaign’s slogan is “Life: brought to you by mining”.

The anti-coal group Rising Tide created its own website sending up the campaign with comments such as “Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining”.

The website’s hosts were forced to remove it within 24 hours of its launch, after the Minerals Council issued a notice under the Copyright Regulations 1969 complaining the content and layout infringed copyright.

We’re likely to see more companies exploring creative legal options for silencing their critics now that they can’t sue for defamation…

From today’s Centre for American Progress email:

Global warming activist Laurie David reported in the Washington Post that the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) refused 500,000 free DVD copies of An Inconvenient Truth, which scientists gave “five stars for accuracy.” David wrote, “In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other ’special interests’ might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want to offer ‘political’ endorsement of the film; and they saw ‘little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members’ in accepting the free DVDs.” The NSTA also expressed concern that accepting the DVDs would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.” But those supporters already include “special interests,” including Exxon-Mobil, Shell Oil, and the American Petroleum Institute, which have given millions in funding to the NSTA. The NSTA has freely distributed oil industry-funded “educational” content like “Fuel-less: You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel,” produced by the American Petroleum Institute (API). The film features the opening line: “You’re absolutely not going to believe this, but everything I have that’s really cool comes from oil!” An API memo leaked to the media in 1998 explains the motivation behind such videos: “Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect barriers against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future.”

Nice little piece about the truth market in today’s Herald

Those crazy kids at Freeport mine in West Papua have been playing I Spy - not on their competitors but local activists. The New-Orleans based mining company set up a fake environmental group to try to capture the passwords of local environmentalists so they could read their emails. They’ve apparently been working closely with Indonesian military intelligence (BIN). BIN is believed to have orchestrated the assassination of human rights activist Munir. Garuda’s deadly upgrade, a film about BIN’s alleged involvement in Munir’s assassination, was one of the films mentioned by DFAT/the Australia Indonesia Institute when explaining their recent decision to cut off funding to the Jakarta International Film Festival (see below).

There’s a link to the original New York Times report on Freeport’s experiment with espionage, as well as a stub of an article on Freeport, over at sourcewatch.

If you thought last year’s nuclear ‘debate’ was a little lopsided, you might want to check out the latest edition of Signature:

On wednesday the world’s six largest polluters will meet in Sydney at the first Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate summit to discuss the role of new technologies in curbing climate change. Nuclear power is likely to be promoted as a potential solution to the world’s greenhouse problems.

The once unpopular nuclear energy industry enjoyed a media revival last year, thanks to a number of prominent politicians calling for a renewed ‘debate’ on the issue.

This month, Signature enters the fray.

MARNI CORDELL speaks with Shadow Minister for Industry and Resources, Martin Ferguson about his push to overturn the ALP’s ‘no new mines’ position.

MIRIAM LYONS investigates one of the longest running PR campaigns in history: the push to sell nuclear power as ‘clean and green’.

And EVE VINCENT reports on the Federal Government’s radical Radioactive Waste Management Bill.

In our photo story the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta celebrate their success in stopping a national radioactive waste dump from being built on their country.

www.spinach7.com/signature 

Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid half a million dollars to a private ‘emergency management and homeland security consultant’ called IEM to ‘ lead the development of a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for Southeast Louisiana and the City of New Orleans’.

See the press release announcing the contract.

URS is one of the partners in the project - an international planning & engineering consultancy which, among other things, handles BHPs & Rio Tintos public reporting, and provides specialised ‘risk management’ and ’strategic planning’ services to the mining industry: read more

This is from today’s Progress Report, an e-newsletter put out by progressive thnk-tank The Center for American Progress

Rumsfeld’s Press Crackdown

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has launched the latest attack in the administration’s war on a free and independent media. The Pentagon is requiring reporters covering the court-martial of U.S. Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar at Fort Bragg, N.C., to “sign agreements that limit their ability to perform their jobs under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” In order to gain access to the proceeding, reporters must “pledge to not interview soldiers at Fort Bragg about the case or ask legal advisors in the media room to speculate on the outcome.” Reporters who don’t sign aren’t allowed to cover the case. These restrictions aren’t taken lightly. To ensure compliance, journalists are “escorted everywhere while on base and some were monitored as they went to the restroom.” Eugene Fidel, a military law expert, “said he has never heard of restrictions against talking to soldiers,” calling such limitations “crazy.”

Ads criticising the Federal Government’s stance on the Timor Sea oil & gas issue have been banned from free-to-air TV on the grounds of defamation risk, The Age reports today.

The Public Relations Institute of Australia is holding a Seminar to big Corporations and their PR Staff on how to undermine the effectiveness of community based activists. Here’s the details:

HOW TO BEAT ACTIVISTS AT THEIR OWN GAME

Canadian PR consultant Ross Irvine will conduct a half-day PRIA (Public Relations Institute of Australia) seminar on Tuesday 19 April on the best strategies to win against activists.

President of Vancouver-based firm, ePublic Relations Ltd, Ross advises clients on how to use activists’ own street-smart tactics in response to their campaigns. He believes activists are winning more and more mining, agriculture, social and consumer issues.

Activists believe they know what is best for us - they have assumed moral leadership on many issues globally and they pressure businesses, governments and society to embrace their ideology.

They often recruit high-profile supporters to their causes, such as academics, media personalities and stars from the entertainment world. For instance, well-known local author Tim Winton was enlisted to support the `Save Ningaloo Reef’ campaign last year in WA.

Activists are hugely successful communicators. Measures of PR success - story placements, number of interviews, shifts in public opinion, legislation supporting their agenda – show that activists not only get their messages heard, but also acted upon.

The Internet is central to their activities because it enables them to pass information around the world instantly to each other to use against their targets.

In Australia, activists have beaten all the efforts of public relations practitioners and consultants from well-funded biotechnology companies to prevent the introduction of GMO (genetically modified organisms) crops in most of the country. In the past 12 months the governments of WA, Victoria, NSW and South Australia have either banned GMO crops altogether or severely limited trials of GMO grains such as canola.

Activist groups are also known as special interest groups, lobby groups or NGOs (non-government organisations). It is estimated there are 50,000 NGOs in the world.

Ross will show how to understand the new activist mindset, how activists use their networks, and the tools they use to win their battles. He will explain how to outflank the attackers and ensure activist organisations meet community standards of accountability and transparency.

The seminar and a panel discussion will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel from 9.00am to 12noon on Tuesday 19 April. Contact the PRIA WA secretariat on priawa@bigpond.com for registrations and enquiries.

PRIAWA Website for contacts

Ross Irvine’s ePublic Relations Inc Website

I wonder what the significance is of holding it in WA? Maybe something to do with all the money that will be flooding into the mining industry in the next decade. Damn, I wish I could be a fly on that wall…

It’s fresh! It’s new! It’s…Miranda Devine. Hang on a minute…

Just got my hands on the first issue of Investigate, which touts itself as a new home for ‘hard-core investigative journalism’. So I was a bit disappointed when I realised I’d just paid eight dollars for the kind of glossy you’d expect to get free with the Weekend Australian. Then I discovered that over half of the ‘articles’ (read opinion pieces) seem to be written by the editor, James Morrow. (The last time I read such a one-act paper it was published by my student guild. Some student papers have a unique talent for burning money, but at a reported 100,000 circulation, I’d say Investigate might be lighting a few AUD bonfires in its back office)

So who is this James fellow & why should I pay $4 to read him rant? Perhaps for the same reason that the IPA paid him to write a ‘backgrounder’ on ABC bias with Tim Blair last year - he’s a ‘journalist’, he’s American, & he’s an apparently bountiful source of predictable neocon copy.

Investigate is modelled on the New Zealand magazine of the same name. Here’s a few extracts from an interview on NZ public radio with Ian Wishart, the owner of the company that will publish both editions (and also the editor of the NZ version):

“One of the striking things about Investigate is how little conventional investigation it actually contains. Recent issues have contained lengthy articles casting doubt on, respectively, the theory of evolution, the future of liberal Christianity, and sex education in schools. Some pages are advertorial.”

“MW: There’s been a strong vein in recent issues of what might be called conservative Christianity. Does that reflect your own faith?

IW: I’ve been a Christian since 1985 but I haven’t really sort of taken up the cudgels on behalf of the faith as it were, um, until really a year and a half ago and I think that was more in response to what is happening in our society around us. Investigate is not a preachy magazine, we’re not touchy-feely Sermon on the Mount kind of stuff, but we’re trying to provide intelligent Christian perspective.”

Investigate, meet Family First.

If you heard a large unexplained noise in February, it may have been a few hundred ABC journos’ heads hitting their desks as they ducked for cover.

In 2003 Minister for Communications Richard Alston complained that the ABC’s complaints review board wasn’t ‘independent’ enough, after it threw out 66 of Alston’s 68 complaints of bias in the ABC’s coverage of the Iraq war. “If you are to have public confidence in the integrity of the process, then you can’t have Caesar judging Caesar” he said.

Two years & a cabinet reshuffle later, Alston’s replacement Helen Coonan may have found the perfect solution – let Brutus judge Caesar instead. Janet Albrechtsen is a conservative columnist and a prominent critic of the ABC. She had a very public stoush with Media Watch when they claimed she had misrepresented foreign research in one of her columns. She was appointed to the ABC board of directors in February. Watch this space. (The vacant one, somewhere between her ears).

Tory leader Michael Howard has shipped in Australia’s Lynton Crosby as his campaign manager for the upcoming UK election. You might remember Lynton from such delightful stunts as the Tampa and children overboard sagas - he’s been instrumental in every successful election campaign by Howard (the other one) so far. The signs are that he has every intention of running with the divide & conquer strategy again - with calls for a ‘crackdown’ on gypsies & asylum seekers.

(Our) Howard imported Reagan-era advisors to bring their wedge-politics experience to bear on the 1996 campaign. It seems the Liberals have now mastered the art of the wedge & are branching into the export market…

For more info see:

The Guardian’s profile of Lynton Crosby
‘Howard the Exploiter’ - the Daily Mirror

If Lawsie ever gets short of cash & wants to sell his silver tongue on the international market, he’d do well to start in the US.

In what has been dubbed the ‘pundit payola’ scandal, recent months have seen a series of conservative commentators caught with their hands in the cookie jar. First it was revealed that syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams was secretly paid US$250,000 by the Bush administration to promote the ‘No Child left Behind’ Act, then it turned out that another pundit, Maggie Gallagher, had been paid $21,500 to promote the President’s ‘marriage initiative’.

Some people are more worried about the waste of taxpayers’ money than the dodgy journalism – that’s well over a quarter of a million for endorsements that Fox News would happily give for free.

From the IFEX bulletin:

UNITED STATES: IAPA ASSAILS “PAYOLA” JOURNALISM

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has criticised the Bush administration for secretly paying journalists to propagate its policies and pressuring reporters to reveal their sources.

The press freedom group says the practice of paying journalists - known as “payola” - may be illegal under US laws, which prohibit the federal government from using propaganda on citizens. In recent months, “USA Today” and the “Washington Post” have revealed that the US government paid hefty sums to two journalists to promote government policies.

The US Education Department secretly paid Armstrong Williams, a syndicated columnist, radio commentator and frequent guest on CNN and CNBC, US$240,000 to promote Bush’s controversial education reform initiative - the No Child Left Behind policy. The Justice Department and Department of Health and Human Services paid syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher to write an article advocating support for Bush’s “Healthy Marriage” initiative.

IAPA recently held its Mid-Year Meeting in Panama, where it assessed press freedom conditions in the Americas. The organisation expressed concern that journalists in the United States were being threatened with jail sentences and fines for refusing to reveal their sources to US authorities. IAPA also expressed concern about Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Ecuador - countries it said were “openly hostile” to media critics.

Visit:
- IAPA
- Attacks on the Press in 2004
- Chicago Sun Times
- Is it Public Relations or Propaganda?
- Think again: pay to play
- www.sourcewatch.org

This article by Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon on On Line Opinion argues that the Carr government would do a lot better if it stopped taking its cues from the Daily Telegraph.

Does the short-term focus of the daily news have a negative effect on the ability/willingness of politicians to take a long term view? What would happen if the Carr government took Lee’s advice and based its actions on ‘good policy’ rather than the latest media beat-up?

How can governments tell whether the media they are guided by is really reflecting public opinion?

On another note, this article takes aim at OLO’s bread & butter - opinions themselves (or at least the people paid to espouse them in public). In the best op-ed tradition of presenting a personal viewpoint with little evidence, the writer takes aim at the ‘growing’ number of opinion pieces filling the Australian media. She asks some good questions,

‘what is it about these people that make their opinion(s) a tradable commodity… (what) does Andrew Bolt or Phillip Adams really know about the war in Iraq that I don’t, or cant’ find out? …What does Piers Ackerman really know about the social problems facing the communities in Redfern or Macquarie Hills that I don’t, or can’t find out?’

…but I think she left out some better ones. Is the ratio of opinion to hard news & features really on the rise? If so, why - could that have something to do with financial pressures? Talk is cheap - talk without research & multiple sources is cheaper still. Do ‘opinion leaders’ really lead anyone’s opinion? If the opinionati do actually have some influence, then what kind of process do they have to go through to get to their positions, and how does that process affect the kind of opinions they hold (at least in public)? What kind of opinions are rewarded & discouraged?

I would love to see some quantative analysis on the ratio of opinion pieces in the news over time.

This article discusses the decisions made by media makers in choosing the language to use in their stories. It’s well worth a read for those interested in the strategic framing of political arguments - or in the hidden value judgements that lie behind apparently ‘objective’ news stories.

Here’s another on the same topic - this time a radio national report on the use of the word ‘terrorist’ and what it means about the media. Thanks to Antony Loewenstein for the link.