PR Watch.

Spying on grass-roots citizens' groups, manufacturing press releases to discredit boycotts, and lobbying to defeat legislative reform are all in a day's work for America's big public-relations firms. "The ascendancy of the PR industry and the collapse of American participatory democracy are the same phenomenon," writes John Stauber, editor and publisher of PR Watch, a new quarterly publication out of Madison, Wisconsin. "When the corporate status quo is threatened by |the rest of us' (seeking better working conditions, national health care, fair prices for farmers, safe food, freedom from toxic pollution, and social justice), the PR flacks, lobbyists, and trade associations mobilize to crush or co-opt the outnumbered, outgunned reformers," Stauber...