Spin - The Art of the Prank

June 13, 2008January 15, 2019

Obama Campaign Fights the Smears

Campaign: Michelle Obama never used word ‘Whitey’
by Nedra Pickler
1010WINS
June 12, 2008

Washington (AP) — Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign said Thursday that Michelle Obama never used the word “whitey” in a speech from the church pulpit as it launched a Web site to debunk rumors about him and his wife.

The rumor that Michelle Obama railed against “whitey” in a diatribe at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ has circulated on conservative Republican blogs for weeks and was repeated by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The rumor included claims of a videotape of the speech that would be used to bring down Obama’s candidacy this fall.

“No such tape exists,” the campaign responds on the site, http://www.fightthesmears.com. “Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word.”

The site is a response to the realities of a brave new world, where information travels 24 hours a day on blogs and voters are increasingly turning to the Internet for information. It’s a particular problem for Obama, a relative newcomer to national politics who is still unknown to many voters and has been the target of persistent misinformation campaigns online. Continue reading “Obama Campaign Fights the Smears”

June 5, 2008January 15, 2019

Slacktivism: Pointless Pursuits of Ineffective Activism

Corporate-Sponsored “Slacktivism”: Bigger and More Dangerous than the Urban Dictionary Realizes
by Anne Landman
The Weekly Spin, PRWatch.org
June 2, 2008

Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like “hobosexual” (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), “consumerican,” (“a particularly American brand of consumerism”), and “wikidemia” (“an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia”).

Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: “slacktivism.”

“Slacktivism” (alternative spelling “slactivism”) is a fusion of the words “slacker” and “activism,” and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to “support the troops,” wearing a colored rubber wristband to “fight cancer,” or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas. Continue reading “Slacktivism: Pointless Pursuits of Ineffective Activism”

May 25, 2008January 15, 2019

The REAL McCain 2

From Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films:

There’s no question John McCain is getting a free ride from the mainstream press. But with the power of YouTube and the blogosphere, we can provide an accurate portrayal of the so-called Maverick. We can put the brakes on his free ride!

Since we first released The Real McCain a year ago, our REAL McCain series has garnered close to 2 million views, with over 13,000 comments and tens of thousands more in petition signatures! Clearly, John McCain’s record is something the public wants to discuss, and yet the corporate media is doing NOTHING to present the truth. We feel obliged to continue countering the mainstream media’s love of McCain. And so we thought it was high time for a sequel: The Real McCain 2:

thanks Abe

In case you missed the first The REAL McCain, posted a year ago by Brave New Films here it is: Continue reading “The REAL McCain 2”

April 21, 2008January 15, 2019

Military Generals as Defense Department Wind-up Toys

Message Machine: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon”s Hidden Hand
by David Barstow
New York Times
April 20, 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantà¡namo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration”s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantà¡namo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration”s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

Read the rest of the article here. It’s long but fascinating.

And, check out this New York Times multi-media report, How the Pentagon Spread Its Message also by David Barstow, April 20, 2008.

Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times, examines primary source documents detailing the Pentagon”s response to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld by a group of prominent retired generals.

thanks Nancy

April 20, 2008January 15, 2019

“Investor Literacy” is a Hoax

11 reasons ‘investor literacy’ is a big hoax
by Paul B. Farrell
MarketWatch
April 15, 2008

Commentary: Wall Street prefers clueless, irrational investors

Arroyo Grande, Calif. (MarketWatch) — So Congress made April “Investor Literacy Month.” What a hoax, a cruel joke, yes, an insult to America’s 95 million investors.

What’s really happening? Here’s the short version: In the past five years Wall Street’s out-of-control greed (with the backing of Greenspan’s cheap-money Fed, an “anything-goes, free-market” White House and a banking industry that loves piling up debt in order to charge excessive fees) created a massive housing-credit bubble to rapidly replace their earlier busted dot-com bubble.

Then last summer the new bubble failed, exploding in our faces, nearly destroying the global monetary system. Result? These two bubbles triggered a diversionary, knee-jerk reaction: A wave of so-called “investor education” programs across the U.S. and world.

That’s the joke, the hoax, the insult. Get it? Wall Street’s greed nearly destroys the world’s economy twice in less than a decade. Solution? Bail out Wall Street, then blame it on the little guy, the Main Street investor, for not being “educated enough!” That’s a hoax. Continue reading ““Investor Literacy” is a Hoax”