Image of Pop Star Purchased by PR Hired Gun and Used to Advocate Against Wage Increases — No Miley Cyrus is Not Against the Minimum Wage

By Mary Bottari and Sean Hoey
On an almost daily basis, Miley Cyrus can be seen in grocery store lines on the cover of entertainment magazines and gossip rags. But now Cyrus is appearing in one place you might not have expected – on a billboard in Los Angeles denouncing higher wages.

The Employment Policies Institute (EPI), whose president is Richard Berman, the infamous PR flak dubbed "Dr. Evil" by 60 Minutes, reportedly purchased the image of Cyrus for a billboard attacking California's $9 minimum wage. Apparently, Berman's clients think that nine bucks an hour is just too much money for folks in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is skyrocketing.

The 72-year-old Berman may not know what twerking means, but he certainly knows how to exploit young people to advance his corporate agenda. Through the years, Berman has launched PR campaigns to convince people that smoking bans are bad, fast food is good, and tanning beds pose no risk of cancer.

Now, through his phony EPI think tank, he is working to convince America that a fair minimum wage will harm teens and the economy, when the opposite is true.

Phony Think Tank Attacks "Raise the Wage" Campaigns

In recent months, the 501 (c)(3) tax exempt Employment Policies Institute (not to be confused with the Economic Policy Institute, a legitimate think tank packed with economists and PhDs) appears to have become supercharged, writing opeds in newspapers across the country and spending big bucks on high-dollar PR tactics, such as full page New York Times ads and TV commercials that warn America of the dangers of higher wages (not to mention the invasion of "commie" economists who back them).

The fact is that EPI doesn't know what it is talking about. A growing body of evidence, including a study of wage hikes during recent high periods of unemployment, shows that minimum wage increases do not cause job loss or slow rehiring. But that doesn't stop newspaper editors from accepting Berman's spin.

A recent review by CMD showed that only 3 percent of the time did newspapers correctly identify EPI as tied to Berman & Co. It isn't hard. As a front page New York Times story pointed out earlier this year, EPI shares an address with Berman & Co. and the PR firm "bills" the tax-exempt nonprofit for services, making it a highly questionable money making venture.

Even $2.13 Is Too Much for Berman

Not only is Berman's EPI fighting against rate hikes for general hourly employees, but it also fights tooth and nail against any effort to raise the wage for tipped workers. For 22 years, the federal tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 an hour, and the gap between the minimum wage and the tipped minimum has never been higher. While Berman likes to portray restaurant workers as young teens, the facts are that two-thirds of food workers are over 21 and 66 percent are women, many of whom are mothers. Some 3.3 million workers get this "subminimum" wage, and many need to rely on foodstamps and other public services to make ends meet. At the same time, restaurant industry profits and CEO pay are soaring, documents the Institute for Policy Studies.

Recently, Berman's EPI ran a wraparound ad in the Washington Post promoting another one of its proliferating websites, Tipped Wage. The ad shows a well-dressed white guy being erased and pleads, "Don't erase my job -- or my tips," as if tips would disappear if workers are given an increase in their $2.13 salary. In the ad, EPI claims to cite the "best economic research," which purports to show that restaurant employment will "dramatically" fall if wages rise. In fact, the best economic research shows that the states with the highest tipped wage have a booming restaurant sector and that raising the wage floor helps workers at the bottom as well as at the top of the wage scale.

But Berman's PR campaigns aren't limited to the economics. He seeks to distort the images of the groups fighting to raise wages.

One of the websites tied to Berman by an electronic "paper trail" is ROCexposed.org, dedicated to tearing down the New York-based non-profit Restaurant Opportunities Center. Founded in memory of the restaurant workers who died on 9-11, ROC advocates for higher wages and fair treatment for restaurant workers. As CMD reported, Berman appears to have tag-teamed with an old client and tipped-wage foe: the National Restaurant Association. Dubbed the "Other NRA", the behemoth food industry lobby shop has apparently earmarked more than $600,000 to attack the Restaurant Opportunities Center and lists ROCexposed.org as a key ally in those efforts. Similarly, Berman's attack website Activistcash.org spins tall tales about his critics, including the Center for Media and Democracy.

Berman's Anti-Environment Front Group Compares Obama to a Terrorist

Another of Berman's most recent PR campaigns involves the Environmental Policy Alliance (EPA), a front group created in the spring of 2014. "EPA" sounds like a ringing endorsement for all things green, and it uses a symbol that looks a heck of a lot like the symbol used by the actual EPA, but a closer look reveals an agenda that only the fossil fuel industry would love.

In June 2014, as a response to the Obama administration's announcement of new federal rules that will dramatically slash emissions from existing power plants, Berman's EPA Facts unleashed a full-page ad in both Politico and USA Today condemning the move as a radical threat to the country's energy resources. The ad compared the administration to a terrorist organization and trumpeted unsubstantiated claims that the rules threatened "to shut down about 25 percent of the energy that powers America's electric grid."

Berman's "EPA" frontgroup operates a number of websites, including Big Green Radicals, EPA Facts, Green Decoys, and LEED Exposed, each taking on a different issue within the environmental movement. Big Green Radicals spends a lot of time attempting to tear down groups like the Sierra Club and Food and Water Watch, an effective DC-based consumer group that fights to protect water and campaigns against fracking. FWW views the Berman attacks as a badge of honor and uses them to raise funds for their campaigns, not the result Berman would hope for.
Berman Group Alleges Animal Rights Group Abuses Animals

Berman is also fond of attacking people seeking to protect animals; he does this via his Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) front group.

In July 2014, CCF relaunched the attack site PETA Kills Animals. The site berates PETA for "dirty tactics," features graphic images of dead dogs, and calls for PETA to be "put down." Berman clients may be upset about PETA's effective campaigns against abusive factory farming practices that underpin cheap eats and the fast food industry. It should come as no surprise that sick and abused animals that are brought to PETA shelters often have to be euthanized. PETA discloses its data on these cases, and then Berman exploits those records to tarnish the organization.

In May 2014, another CCF website, Humane Watch, launched new ads, including one in USA Today charging the Humane Society of the United States with being corrupt and mismanaged. HSUS spokesperson Alan Heymann speculated that industry interests, like factory farms and puppy mills, are fearful of HSUS's work and were fueling the attacks to discredit the organization. He added that if Berman and his front groups really cared about animal welfare, they would choose to invest directly in other animal rights groups rather than slandering a reputable charity.

According to a report in LA Weekly, the use of Cyrus' image could land the Berman team in hot water: "Most celebrities are very litigious, and if [Cyrus] doesn't stand behind it they could end up being in a legal mess," said Steven M. Weinberg, an intellectual property and branding attorney. "It's okay to use something in an informational, First Amendment way, but if you look like she's endorsing it you could run into problems. If, in fact, this is not her position, then it may transcend First Amendment protection."

If Cyrus doesn't take action, next we will hear that she was spotted with President Obama shooting cats and dogs at an HSUS fundraiser. Nothing seems beneath the Berman spin machine.

---

Check out the Center for Media and Democracy's profiles of Berman front groups and attack websites in our SourceWatch wiki:

• Richard Berman
• Berman and Co.
• Employment Policies Institute
• Environmental Policy Alliance
• Center for Consumer Freedom
• Center for Union Facts
• EPA Facts
• Big Green Radicals
• LEED Exposed
• Green Decoys
• Humane Watch
• PETA Kills Animals
• Tipped Wage
• Bad Idea CA
  
  
  

Reprinted with permission from PRWatch.

How Microsoft and Yahoo Are Selling Politicians Access to You — And They Won't Tell You Your iInformation is Used for Political Targeting.

Photo by Robert Scoble.

By Lois Beckett, ProPublica
Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services.

The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting.

In one sense, campaigns are doing a more sophisticated version of what they've always done through the post office — sending political fliers to selected households. But the Internet allows for more subtle targeting. It relies not on email but on advertisements that surfers may not realize have been customized for them.

Campaigns use voters records to assemble lists of people they're trying to reach — for instance, "registered Republicans that have made a donation," Yahoo's director of sales Andy Cotten told ProPublica. Microsoft and Yahoo help campaigns find these people online and then send them tailored ads.

These messages don't just pop up in Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Because Microsoft and Yahoo operate huge networks that provide advertising on some of the most popular web destinations, targeted ads can appear when a voter visits a swath of different sites.

Microsoft and Yahoo said they safeguard the privacy of their users and do not share their users' personal information directly with the campaigns. Both companies also said they do not see the campaigns' political data, because the match of voter names and registration data is done by a third company. They say the matching is done to target groups of similar voters, and not named individuals.

According to Microsoft, President Obama's re-election campaign has recently done this kind of targeting, and both national political parties have done so previously.

The marketing site ClickZ, the Wall Street Journal, Slate and others have previously noted the ability of campaigns to target online ads to specific groups of voters. But what has not been detailed is which companies are now making the targeting possible by providing users' personal information — and which have decided it's off-limits.

Google and Facebook told ProPublica they do not offer this kind of political matching service.

Google's privacy policy classifies political beliefs as "sensitive personal information," which should not be used for online ad targeting. Facebook does allow political campaigns to target political advertisements, but only on the basis of political beliefs reported by the users themselves, rather than information culled from their voting records.

Jules Polonetsky, a former chief privacy Officer at AOL, and now the director of the Future of Privacy Forum, said political targeting has grown more aggressive in recent years.

Polonetsky recalls conversations within the online ad industry about "not wanting to do things like targeting users based on donor history" because "all of that was considered far too sensitive and likely to alarm users and set off privacy concerns."

"Today, those barriers have been leapt over with abandon," he said.

Industry experts argue targeted advertising can help campaigns save money by advertising more efficiently, a factor that could level the playing field for smaller campaigns.

Privacy advocates note that there's no way to track what messages campaigns are showing to different targeted groups — or whether politicians may be pandering to different voters.

"Whenever a campaign or other big organization knows much more about you and your habits than you know about them, any voter is open to manipulation," said Chris Calabrese, the privacy lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Neither presidential campaign would comment on how it targets voters.

"We have no interest in telling our opponents our digital strategy," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Katie Hogan. "However, this campaign has always and will continue to be an organization that respects and takes care to protect information that people share with us."

Mitt Romney's campaign, which also uses sophisticated microtargeting tactics, did not respond to requests for comment. Targeted Victory, a firm that specializes in digital political targeting, had done nearly $4 million of work for Romney's presidential campaign as of March. Targeted Victory's advertised services include reaching voters online using voter registration data. The company's co-founder, Zac Moffat, currently serves as the Romney campaign's digital director. Neither Moffat nor Targeted Victory would comment on whether the Romney campaign is using voter records to reach potential supporters online.

Microsoft would answer questions about its targeting services only through a public relations spokesperson, who also asked that her name not be used. Microsoft's chief privacy officer, Brendon Lynch, did not respond to requests for comment.

Yahoo would not comment on specific clients, but said it has worked with Democrats and Republicans.

The Republican National Committee worked with both Yahoo and AOL to match Internet users to voter lists in 2007, according to Becki Donatelli, co-founder of Connell Donatelli, one of the most prominent Republican digital strategy firms. Contacted by ProPublica, AOL would not explain how its targeting service works.

The Republican National Committee also wouldn't provide details about its practices, but a spokeswoman said, "Targeting is one part of a larger playbook we have and will continue to employ. We follow legal guidelines and industry best practices." The Democratic National Committee did not respond to requests for comment.

When you see an online ad, you may assume it's comparable to a billboard — identical to everyone who walks by. But that's not the case for many ads. In the milliseconds it takes for a page to load, advertisers can identify a particular user visiting a site, and choose ads to display based on what they know about that user.

For instance, surfers may be shown a shoe ad if they recently visited a shoe site. Most of this sort of targeting doesn't require your name. Political targeting does. Campaigns may want to reach only reliable party members, or independents who might swing their way.

In order to do this, campaigns assemble lists of names from public records of voters they hope to reach, using such criteria as party registration, turnout history and previous donations. The campaigns often hire companies that harvest vast amounts of consumer data about individual Americans, further refining their voter lists with factors not publicly available such as income, education, magazine subscriptions, and purchasing habits.

Finding voters online is difficult, since no public record connects voters to a particular Internet address.

That's where Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and other lesser-known companies come in. Their enormous stores of registration data can serve as the bridge between particular Internet users and their voter information.

Online advertising is delivered with the help of cookies, tiny files that companies place on surfers' browsers. Cookies can be used to track people as they move from site to site, helping specialized firms most users have never heard of create detailed records of the sites users visit and the links they click. This tracking is typically done through anonymous ID numbers; the tracking firms and advertisers don't know you by name.

Microsoft and Yahoo's targeting service combines two crucial factors: their knowledge of users' personal information and their ability to add cookies to browsers. Over the years, Internet users have given these companies their name when they signed up for free programs like the Microsoft suite of services known as Windows Live, which includes Hotmail. (Microsoft said it does not sell campaigns access to information users provide when they register for Office or other Microsoft products they've bought.)

Microsoft and Yahoo both said the cookies aren't connected directly to names or other personally identifying information. Instead, they use a complicated process to match coded voter information back to anonymous cookies on particular users' browsers.

But many parts of the process remain unclear since the companies were reluctant to explain the details of their matching and targeting.

Microsoft said that the credit reporting giant Experian performs a "double-blind" match between Microsoft's data and campaigns' data. Yahoo uses another massive data company, Acxiom. Both Experian and Acxiom also offer similar matching for commercial clients who want to find previous customers online.

"They don't need your permission to do this," said William McGeveran, a data privacy expert at the University of Minnesota Law School. As long as a company has not explicitly promised users not to do this kind of matching, the process is legal for both political and commercial entities, McGeveran said.

Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all point out that users who don't want to be targeted can opt out.

"At AOL, we take privacy very seriously," Caroline Campbell, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an email. "We strongly support self-regulation, consumer transparency and choice, and responsible uses of data."

The Network Advertising Initiative, an industry group, offers a one-page site that allows users to turn off targeted advertising from a long list of prominent companies. Another industry group, the Digital Advertising Alliance, also offers a one-page opt-out site.

But you need to realize you're being tracked before you can decide whether to opt out.

Under the online ad industry's self-regulations, most targeted ads are marked with a tiny blue triangle and a phrase like "Ad Choices." Web surfers can click on this icon, read some general information about targeted ads, and find a link to a page that will allow them to opt out of receiving such ads in the future. Few ever notice or understand the symbol.

Speaking to an industry audience at the CampaignTech conference in Washington, D.C., in April, Cotten, from Yahoo, said less than one percent of Yahoo's users have chosen to opt out of targeted advertising.

"Most users are not even cognizant that they're being targeted," he said.

Nor are the companies' privacy policies much help.

Microsoft's privacy policy makes no mention of matching people's names and Zip codes against voter lists.

The Microsoft online privacy highlights page notes that the company collects users' personal information, and that "We use the information we collect to provide the services you request. Our services may include the display of personalized content and advertising." Like Yahoo and other companies, Microsoft's privacy policy is broken up over several different Web pages.

In an "advertising privacy supplement" Microsoft explains it may target ads using data from other companies, as well as "demographic or interest data, including any you may have provided when creating a Windows Live ID (e.g. age, ZIP or postal code, gender)." It does not say whether it classifies users' first and last names as "demographic or interest data."

"You are in charge of deciding whether we know anything about you," Microsoft explains elsewhere. "But the more you tell us about yourself, the more we can help you find information or products you want."

Yahoo's more straightforward privacy policy on data matching explains that the company may combine its users' personally identifiable information with information from other companies in order to customize ads. It names CampaignGrid, a political targeting firm, as one company that helps Yahoo! "provide more relevant content and advertising." Yahoo told ProPublica users' registration data is "consensually provided."

AOL's advertising privacy policy explains that it may customize ads "by using the registration data or other household data you have provided or that we have acquired from other companies."

The voter matching process is still far from perfect. Blaise Hazelwood of Grassroots Targeting, a Republican firm, said that the process is expensive, and that it's typically only possible to locate 20 to 40 percent of a given list of voters online in a typical matching process.

"You're not getting everyone," she said, "but the people you get, it's great."

Hazelwood was one of the first to use this tactic. She worked with Resonate, a data and targeting company, to deliver online ads to groups of Louisiana voters during Bobby Jindal's 2007 gubernatorial campaign.

In a 2008 campaign supporting a California proposition to ban gay marriage, Republican firm Connell Donatelli targeted online ads at registered Democrats over the age of 55, Kate Kaye of Clickz News first reported. One of the firm's strategists compared online voter matching to "a stealth bomber."

This spring, the Federal Trade Commission, which maintains the national "Do Not Call" registry, called for Web companies to implement a "Do Not Track" mechanism "that would provide a simple, easy way for consumers to control the tracking of their online activities."

Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have agreed to implement "Do Not Track," but how exactly websites and advertisers will have to respond to the setting isn't clear.

In a surprise move, Microsoft recently made "Do Not Track" the default setting for the latest version of Internet Explorer browser, a decision that has received fierce pushback from the advertising industry and a key policy group.

Defending its stance, Microsoft's chief privacy officer last week cited a recent Pew study that found that 68 percent of respondents "were 'Not OK' with targeted advertising."

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

Parent Company Disney Using Its NBC 'News' To Tell Happy Stories About Itself

By Peter Hart
Granted, the network morning news programs can seem a little devoid of news sometimes. But they're still produced by the news divisions, and thus in theory are news shows. Which is why it's good to check in, every now and then, to see what they think is worth putting on the air.

Like ABC's Good Morning America's "exclusive" report (5/2/14) about its parent company. "We've got breaking news from Disney," correspondent Ginger Zee explained. "It's a new kind of magic at the Walt Disney World Resorts." What is it? Some sort of wristband, which is "like a magic wand that lets you do just about anything."

But that's not all–there's also a new ride at the park, and a new parade "with larger-than-life floats unlike anything I'd ever seen. A land of fantasy, growing bigger and helping our imaginations grow bigger every year."

It doesn't appear that ABC bothered with the sort of normal journalistic disclosure during the segment. (Zee exclaiming "it's tough not to find magic here at Disney" doesn't count.) Perhaps it was just too obvious.

Or maybe it's simply too hard to keep track of all the Disney promotion they're doing; a few days later (5/4/14) the show was reporting on "Star Wars Day" and promoting a new Star Wars cartoon. The franchise, as an on-screen disclosure noted, just so happens to be owned by Disney.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

MSNBC "Leaning Forward" To Promote Fracking

The LEAN FORWARD brand is rolling out online with General Electric and America's Natural Gas Alliance as the site launch partners. How do partnerships like these affect the content you see as news?

Related Article: Fracking and MSNBC: Network's 'Lean Forward' Website Funded With Sneaky 'Native' Pro-Fracking Ads

Fracking and MSNBC: Network's 'Lean Forward' Website Funded With Sneaky 'Native' Pro-Fracking Ads

"Native content is a digital advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing content in the context of the user’s experience, matching both the form and function of the environment in which it is placed," explained a recent MarketingWeek article. If banner ads and pop-up ads are "overt ads," then native ads are best described as "covert ads," akin to the controversial "video news releases" for TV news.

MSNBC "Leans Forward" Into Running "Native Ads" Promoting Fracking (via Desmogblog)

Three years into its "Lean Forward" re-branding campaign, MSNBC has given new meaning to the catchphrase, leaning forward into running branded content promoting hydraulic fracturing ("fracking").  Looking to beef up its web presence, MSNBC has brought…