Nexus - 0208 - New Times Magazine-pages

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... GLEBAL NEWS ... NEWS his shoulder. The driver appears to do this a frac- tion of an instant after Kennedy is hit by at least one other shot from behind (through the neck?). The brain matter is clearly shown exploding through the rear of the head, consistent with a pistol shot from the front, at close quarters. I note that the President's wife at this point is franti- cally trying to get out of the car, by climbing over the back! This is inter- preted by some as “trying to gather up the President's brains", believe it or not. I note also the rumours that many of the eyewitnesses to the killing claim they saw the driver do it. Anyway, news just to hand:- A doc- tor who was part of the hospital team treating the President, has gone public and declared that the fatal head wound had to have come from the front. Dr. Charles Crenshaw has broken a 29 year silence about the assassination in two nationally televised TV inter- views. THE ASTEROIDS ARE COMING! Several news items have innocently made their way into the papers recently. The father of the H bomb, Dr Edward Teller, has been urging the US and other countries to unite and develop bombs and missiles to be used to blow up so called "Doomsday Asteroids" before they collide with Earth. For those who already guessed, a "Doomsday Asteroid" is big enough to send us back to cave-man times, assum- ing any of us survive at all. This type of asteroid only needs to be larger than one kilometre wide to cause massive global changes. NASA estimates that there could be more than 4,000 such asteroids out there, but that only about 400 are cruis- ing about on dangerous orbits. My concerns are:- a) Can we detect such asteroids in time to do anything about them? I recall such a "Doomsday Asteroid” just missed us during the Gulf War, and no- CORPORATE CONTROLLED NEWS? Extracted from an article entitled Advertising Invades the Newsroom by Carl Hammarskjold, which appeared in a November 1991 issue of the “Anderson Valley Advertiser” , (Booneville, CA, USA) Increasingly, what TV news stations pass off as news are actually video news releas- es: expensive and professional videos prepared by advertising firms and paid for by large corporations. _ Groups like Medialink beam these video news releases, or VNRs, via satellite to tele- vision news editors. These editors, lured by the polished product available at no cost, run these press releases as news, much like the print media do with the VNRs, written counterparts. The result: corporate-sponsored ad agencies are subtly changing and con- trolling the news we see on the tube, Their use is widespread. For example, 81.2 million people saw a “news” report on dolphin-safe tuna fishing methods on TV last year. Reporters did not dig up this story. It was fed to them by Starkist Seafood Co., who hired Chicago- based Edelman Public Relations Worldwide to produce it. Ad executives sailed on fishing boats to promote Starkist’s product. News directors, undoubtedly impressed by the artfully shot and edit- ed scenes of playful dolphins, fierce seas, and rugged yet environmentally sensitive boathands, ate it up. The question: Is dolphin-safe tuna newsworthy without easily available PR material about it? If so, why not assign reporters to the story instead of relying on the advertising people? If not, why run it on the news at all? The answer, of course, is money. Assigning reporters and camera crews to an all-day or even all-week _ fishing expedition is an expense that most news stations cannot afford, or at least wish to avoid. But StarKist can afford it. In fact, faced with a nationwide boycott of their tuna, StarKist can’t afford not to. Edelman also produced a VNR for the Nutrasweet Company about fat substitutes which was run as “news” and seen by 54.] million people. No doubt this VNR featured scientists talking about health hazards, maybe even an animated segment showing fat cells clogging up arteries and killing folks. Then an interview with a Nutrasweet tech- nician reporting objectively on alternatives to fatty foods. Other cxamples: 21.8 million people watched Soviets line up at the new Moscow McDonald’s to enjoy a hamburger, McDonald's Corporation paid Patterson-Parkington First International of Toronto to create the news. Here we have Americans watching a Canadian-made film of Russians eating Central American beef. First International, indeed. And 18.6 million people leamed about the “International Rotten Sneaker Contest” from their trusty news anchors. Odor-Eaters paid Combe, Inc. of White Plains, New York to create that news. All of these examples are amusing in a disgusting sort of way, But some video news releases are deadly. For instance, 61.4 million people saw a VNR on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. 35.3 million saw a later VNR depicting human rights abuses perpetrated by the Iraqis against the Kuwaitis. Reporters were not involved in these two particular news accounts. Hill and Knowlton of Washington, DC created this news, commissioned by a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, This group, rumored to be working with five million petrodollars belonging to the Emir himself, also hired a PR firm to mass pro- duce “Free Kuwait” T- shirts, flags, bumper stickers, and assorted Desert Shield/Storm souvenirs. The group’s task was to put a positive spin on the Emir’s repressive regime so that Americans could feel good about killing and dying to restore Kuwait's legiti- © mate dictator. Perhaps the only bigger distributor of video news releases than Medialink is the Pentagon. What name other than VNR could you call the footage of smart bombs drop- ping through Iraqi chimneys? The networks salivated over that video clip, and hun- dreds of others like it, supplied by the military, designed to put a positive spin on what the United Nations now calls “near apocalyptic” allied bombing which has brought Iraq back “to a pre-industrial age.” his shoulder. COMING! NEXUS¢*7 JUNE-JULY 1992 THE ASTEROIDS ARE