Karr relates how concerned people and non-incarcerated journalists delivered "60,000 letters"—which "were collected in less than 72 hours"—to St. Paul's City Hall, where fellow activist Nancy Doyle Brown explained how, "tragically, there are stories that the world needed to hear this week that will never be told" because "reporters working on them were sitting in the back of squad cars, were stripped of their cameras, or were face down on the pavement with their hands cuffed behind their backs."

Noting that, "as a rule, AP is not hesitant to criticize presidential acceptance speeches," Baker gives us the headline over their report on Obama's Democratic nomination acceptance speech: "Obama Spares Details: Keeps Up Attacks." Their headline on the McCain acceptance speech?: "McCain Makes Bipartisan Pitch as Leader for All."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost It, and Why We Need It Back (1–2/05) by Steve Rendall

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at the demise of whistleblower protections, Lipitor's new pitch man, and how to look like you're military without actually enlisting. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at the Ogilvy and Mather advertising firm. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!

This is a classic example of false balance at work. The idea that the Democratic National Convention was run by the teachers union and big labor is absurd; the Democrats' education platform endorsed merit pay, which teachers unions oppose, and the convention was markedly subdued on the trade issue. But to King, clearly, accuracy takes a back seat to "balance."

CEPR co-director Weisbrot's research shows that, out of 267 TV news stories that mentioned the offshore drilling proposal, only one report cited the Energy Information Agency's finding that this would take 20 years to have an insignificant effect on gas prices:Broadcasts almost completely ignored data, and conclusions, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s EIA. The EIA finds that the benefits from such drilling would be too small to have a significant effect on the price of oil. There is no legitimate reason for this omission in the media. Just as economic reporting regularly uses data (unemployment, inflation, GDP, trade) from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or Bureau of Labor Statistics, reporting on energy relies on data from the EIA.

Citing polls in which over half of those surveyed call environmental protections a "major cause of the recent increase in gasoline prices," Weisbrot very reasonably posits that "omission of the relevant data from this recent reporting may have contributed to the widespread public misunderstanding."

"Well, the Daily Kos," she finally offered, citing the blog where political lefties go to post their rants. "How about one big mainstream news organization?" I prodded. "There must be one that has smeared Gov. Palin." Swift seemed confused. She looked toward an aide. Surrounded by a scrum of reporters, she lowered her head and moved away.

See FAIR's new Media Advisory: Maverick No Matter What: McCain's VP Pick Just Reinforces Media Storyline (9/3/08)

Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: Forrest Hylton on FARC Laptops (5/23/08)

Dean Baker's conclusion: "So Bush had a short and relatively weak period of job growth. What exactly was he supposed to get credit for?"

See also FAIR's Action Alert: NYT Falls for White House Spin on Economy: No One 'Envies' Bush GDP Record (1/28/08)

"We do not want children to smoke,” British American Tobacco (BAT) declares on its website. But the company that describes itself as the “world’s most international tobacco group” routinely violates its own voluntary international marketing and advertising standards, according to a July 1, 2008 BBC-TV This World investigation. BAT was caught in Malawi, Mauritius and Nigeria using marketing tactics that are well-known to appeal to youth: advertising and selling single cigarettes, and sponsoring non-age-restricted, product-branded musical entertainment. (See also "Playing with Children's Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi.")

When a company adopts and prominently touts its voluntary behavior codes, only to end up violating them, people start asking questions: What are the real reasons for these codes? Are they just for public relations (PR) purposes? To, as they say, ‘cover your a*s’ (CYA)? How did they arise? What, if any, value do they have?

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The U.S. Labor Department has only "ruled in favor of [corporate] whistleblowers 17 times out of 1,273 complaints filed since 2002," and has dismissed 841 cases. Many of the dismissals were based "on the technicality that workers at corporate subsidiaries aren't covered" by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The Act, passed after the Enron and Worldcom scandals, contained the first federal protections for corporate whistleblowers. Senator Patrick Leahy, who helped draft the Act, says it covers workers in corporate subsidiaries. "Otherwise," he explained, "a company that wants to do something shady, could just do it in their subsidiary." The Labor Department disagrees. One of the whistleblower cases it dismissed involves communications giant WPP. A former staffer at WPP's ad firm Ogilvy & Mather claims he was fired "in retaliation for his cooperation with a federal criminal investigation into his employer's billing practices." Two former Ogilvy executives received prison sentences for overbilling the U.S. government, but the staffer's whistleblower complaint was dismissed. Even though WPP describes its firms as "centrally integrated," the Labor Department ruled that Ogilvy is a subsidiary not covered by Sarbanes-Oxley.

Providing some crucial background entirely missing from a New York Times article on what Baker calls "the Food and Drug Administration's drug approval process which often allows drugs on the market before there is direct evidence of their effectiveness":It would have been worth noting how government patent monopolies distort this process. Drug companies are anxious to gain patent rents and therefore will aggressively lobby the FDA to approve their drug, whether or not their has been sufficient testing. By contrast, in cases where there are already a number of drugs to treat a specific health condition, like those discussed in this article, it would be socially beneficial to require long and extensive testing, since there is little reason to believe that a new drug will offer substantial addition benefits.

The article quotes an industry representative as complaining that such a requirement would be expensive and discourage the development of new drugs. Of course that is precisely the desired outcome. We would rather see drug companies pursue cures for health conditions where current treatments are inadequate than try to develop copycat drugs. This point should have been discussed explicitly in the article.

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: NYT Pushing Drug Company Line (2/07) by Janine Jackson

In more news from corporate media's Inverse-Priorityville, stories about a presidential candidate's lies about policy are of little interest—whereas stories about the personal lives of the candidate's children are considered to be of major importance:Sarah Palin apparently lied about abusing her powers as governor, firing a capable Public Safety Commissioner without cause. Campaign reporters find that mildly interesting, but during a lengthy interview between John McCain and Chris Wallace yesterday, the subject didn't even come up. But now that John McCain's running mate's teenage daughter is having a baby, now reporters are... demanding answers....

The McCain campaign, as part of its pushback, had an anonymous aide tell Reuters that the Obama campaign has been behind the rumor mongering on Palin's family life, and for reasons that defy comprehension, Reuters ran the allegation without support or evidence. This afternoon, Obama hosted a press conference in which he hoped to talk about the federal response to Hurricane Gustav. Following the McCain campaign's sleazy tactics today, reporters had other issues on their minds....

As for the McCain's campaign's assertion that the Obama team played a role in going after Palin's family, Obama didn't even let the reporter finish asking the question: "I am offended by that statement.... "We don't go after people's families. We don't get them involved in the politics. It's not appropriate and it's not relevant."

Benen ends with the hope that campaign reporters "can find something else interesting tomorrow."

Presidential campaign correspondent Powell tries to give respect to civil rights activists who planned to watch "the first black major-party presidential nominee in the nation’s history give his acceptance speech":These veterans of the March on Washington are the living connective tissue to the America of 1963, when the police in some cities and towns still beat blacks with truncheons.

Yeah, thank goodness that never happens anymore....