Link Of Interest: Source Watch

Source Watch is conducting its Fifth Annual Falsies Awards. Check out the nominations here.

The link will take you to the site.

The nominees include among others:

Coal Is the New Green: The coal industry-funded front group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) and the public relations firm Edelman have been promoting dirty energy with green rhetoric. ABEC doubled its budget in 2008, launching a $35 million ad campaign promoting "clean" coal, paying millions more to co-sponsor several U.S. presidential debates and hiring people to walk "around as human billboards" outside a January 2008 debate, handing out leaflets "with questions for voters to ask the [Democratic presidential] candidates." ABEC also tried to organize opposition to a climate change bill before the U.S. Senate, at one point misrepresenting itself to grassroots activists as an environmental group with no industry ties. In Britain, the PR firm Edelman helped energy company E.ON counter protests against its Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, while the firm's Canadian branch promoted its plans to go "carbon neutral." As one Edelman executive anticipating the next round of international climate change negotiations noted, there's a "global opportunity for carbon messaging."

Disputing the Count of the Dead: In January 2008, a spate of editorials appeared, attacking a peer-reviewed study from 2006 that estimated 650,000 "excess deaths" in Iraq, over the 40 months following the U.S. invasion. The Wall Street Journal claimed that the 2006 study, which was published in the British medical journal Lancet, "could hardly be more unreliable." The editorial, and others like it, repeated allegations made in a National Journal article titled "Data Bomb," which the Lancet study authors and other academics have challenged. Around the same time, another peer-reviewed study by the Iraqi Health Ministry and World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 151,000 Iraqis died due to violence, over the same 40 months. Many reporters and editorial writers saw the WHO study as a further challenge to the Lancet study, though the WHO data predicts that more than 400,000 Iraqis have died from both violent and non-violent causes. In July 2008, the New York Times reported that high costs and increasing U.S. military restrictions on reporters and photographers -- including "what some journalists say is a growing effort ... to control graphic images from the war" -- has led to declining news coverage of Iraq.

Front Groups Go Postal: Concerned that junk mail -- the unwanted catalogs, product offers and other direct mail clogging up mailboxes -- is not just annoying, but bad for the environment? Don't worry! Mail Moves America claims that "direct mail is not trees, it is printed communication." Mail Moves America is a front group established by the Direct Marketing Association, in response to U.S. states forming "do not mail" lists, which are patterned after the popular "do not call" lists that block telemarketers. Although it's not allowed to lobby, the U.S. Postal Service works "closely" with Mail Moves America, "to quash the Do Not Mail initiatives," according to the Washington Post. Another pro-junk mail group, IP Moves the Mail, was founded by the International Paper Company.