Medialink Worldwide

In 1998 Medialink, a dominant player in the US, which had a small London production facility, but had mainly concentrated on distribution and monitoring in the UK, acquired broadcast PR and production agency the London Bureau.

Video news releases have been on the political hot seat here, with the BBC backing out of a deal with a U.S. company to use the broadcaster's news operations. The BBC suspended a deal set in October with Medialink that would have allowed the VNR company to use BBC crews to tape the releases...

The BBC and Medialink, meanwhile, appeared to accept that the current political and media climate had made it impossible to proceed with the deal. The BBC's director-general, John Birt, responding to inquiries on the deal from Labour MP and shadow broadcasting minister Jack Cunningham, wrote: We share your concern about the integrity of our news cov-erag....After initial discussions, colleagues in both BBC Resources and News and Current Affairs did not feel that such an arrangement would be in keeping with those guidelines. I understand that it was therefore de-cided not to proceed with the contract.

BBC Resources said in a statement: It is vital that no one should impute that any business agreement-albeit only for technical resources-between BBC Resources and an external customer could affect the BBC's editorial independence....Therefore, the parties have decided it is in their best interests not to proceed with an agreement this side of the next general election. A spokesman for BBC Resources said this arrangement was not at odds with Mr. Birt's stance.

Medialink, however, appeared to leave the door open to another video news release deal. David Davis, vice chairman of Medialink's U.K. operation, said the deal was 'on ice' rather than scrapped. "Hopefully, our action will help to bring some balance of better understanding of the informative value of the VNR so that at a future date we can resume the cooperation agreement with BBC Resources in a more enlightened environment," Mr. Davis said. Until the current controversy erupted, the domestic marketplace for VNRs was small, but well established and perceived as growing.

Climate change denial

The campaign against Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth is a part of the oil industry's rearguard action against the growing public consensus on climate change. For them, nothing is more important than delaying public acceptance. Soon after the movie was released, the PR firm Medialink Worldwide issued a video news-release called "Global Warming And Hurricanes: All Hot Air?" featuring Dr William Gray and Dr James J O'Brien, identified as "two of the world's top weather and ocean scientists," who ground out their rote denials of global warming's effects, citing only misleading evidence. Their clients were our friends TCS and its then owner the DCI Group, one of whose backers, ExxonMobil, funded the TCS Foundation with $95,000 in 2003 alone. O'Brien was all cozied-up with the George C Marshall Foundation, which received $25,000 from ExxonMobil in 2004 for "climate change activities" (although some suggest it was up to $170,000) Also active in discrediting Gore was the Competitive Enterprise Institute think-tank. It released two TV ads in May 2006, just as An Inconvenient Truth was rolling out, with the ridiculous tagline: "Carbon Dioxide - They Call It Pollution; We Call It Life," and claiming, inter alia, that "glaciers are growing, not shrinking, getting thicker, not thinner." CEI received $2million from Exxon between 1998 and 2005, alongside contributions from Texaco, Amoco, Coca-Cola and Koch Industries, a fixture on the American far right since its founder Fred Koch joined the John Birch Society in the late 1950s (they were the "superpatriots" who thought water-fluoridation was a communist plot and that President Eisenhower was a Soviet plant). Worthy enemies indeed.

"Hurricane seasons for the next 20 years could be severe, but don't blame global warming," intoned the news anchor for WTOK-11, a rural ABC affiliate in Meridan, Mississippi, on May 31. The clip aired nine months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region, knocking WTOK off the air.

The anchor was reading an introduction to a report, Global Warming: Hot Air?, which was narrated by Kate Brookes. "There's a lot of debate as to what's been causing all these hurricanes," she says. "Some scientists say it's a naturally occurring cycle, while others have made the claim global warming is to blame."

Yet an interview with Dr William Gray, a hurricane expert from Colorado State University, firmly rejects the latter possibility. He blames the "cycle of nature itself", and insists satellite data shows "no significant change" in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes worldwide during the past 20 years. "This year the prob-ability of a major hurricane is about 81%," concludes Brookes. "And while this number is a prediction, it's based on science and research, so it never hurts to be prepared. I'm Kate Brookes."

No word on Gray's detractors, who cite compelling evidence that global warming has spawned ferocious hurricanes. And while Brookes never identifies herself as "Kate Brookes for WTOK-II News," or "Kate Brookes for ABC News," she has quite a reputation. Not as a reporter, but as a flack for PR company Medialink Worldwide Inc, the world's largest creator of Video News Releases, or VNRs, corporate propaganda designed to look like legitimate news.

While Brookes may lack journalistic credentials, she certainly makes up for this through sheer chutzpah. Her prints are all over fake news stories, aired on affiliates for ABC, CBS and Fox, as she "reports" on medi-cal devices and ethanol plants from electronics giant Siemens AG. The WTOK clip was one of 54 VNRs identified by a Centre for Media and Democracy (CMD) report called Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs, which was released on November 14. In April, CMD's report Fake TV News identified 36 VNRs.