Tag: Brad Jacobson

Exclusive: Ideology trumps experience in Federal Election Commissioner’s rise

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Caroline Hunter’s confirmation to the Election Assistance Commission in February 2007 came near the end of the agency’s controversial handling of two internally contentious commissioned studies — one on voter fraud and the other on voter identification laws. Pressure to fill the four-member bipartisan commission was high: the election season was heating up.

Emails released to Congress about the two studies, reviewed by Raw Story, reveal that Hunter’s selection was not only well-timed but also succeeded in installing an ideologically partisan insider on the commission.

EXCLUSIVE: Obama received $20 million of healthcare Industry money in 2008

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While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats’ massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found.

Pentagon used psychological operation on US public, documents show

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A months-long review of documents and interviews with Pentagon
personnel has revealed that the Bush Administration’s military analyst
program — aimed at selling the Iraq war to the American people —
operated through a secretive collaboration between the Defense
Department’s press and community relations offices.

Raw Story has also uncovered evidence that directly ties the
activities undertaken in the military analyst program to an official US
military document’s definition of psychological operations —
propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign
audiences.

Gene Randall 'Reporting,' Inc.

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My article published yesterday in Columbia Journalism Review:

Former CNN correspondent-turned-PR consultant Gene Randall’s video “report” for oil giant Chevron might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism. But the Randall-Chevron production raises not only ethical questions, but also the question of whether a surge of newly pink-slipped reporters might go, as one media critic put it, “over to the dark side” and how that might further muddy the line between news and corporate advocacy.