The lead author of the largest lung cancer screening study ever performed has come under fire for accepting cigarette company funding for the study and failing to disclose the relationship to the medical journal that published the results. Dr. Claudia Henschke, chief of the Chest Imaging Division at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City stunned the lung cancer research community by concluding that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented by the widespread use of computerized tomography (CT) scans. Small print at the end of the article describing the study results published in the New England Journal of Medicine noted only that the study had been partly financed by the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention and Treatment. The New York Times discovered, however, that the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by the Vector Group, the parent company of the Liggett Group, Inc., manufacturer of Eve, Liggett Select, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid brand cigarettes. The Times article highlighted the increasingly common practice of researchers and universities creating foundations and institutes as a way to shield information about their funders from the public, publishers and the press.

According to the Tennessee Ethics Commission's staff, a public relations firm that set up a front group that's encouraging people to contact legislators needs to register as a lobbyist. At issue is a proposal to allow Tennesseans to order wine over the Internet. The Tennessee Wine and Spirits Wholesalers, which opposes the bill, hired the prominent Nashville firm Seigenthaler Public Relations. The firm set up a website for the group "Tennesseans Against Teen Drinking." The group describes itself as "a statewide coalition of concerned Tennesseans," but "only the liquor wholesalers have provided funding so far." The group's website allows visitors to send state legislators "prepared e-mail messages opposing Internet wine sales and the sale of wine in grocery stores," saying doing so "would promote drinking by juveniles." The PR firm's president warned that requiring lobbyist registration would "lead to the chilling of free speech." But one of the legislators who requested the Ethics Commission opinion said it differentiates between "citizen groups" and PR firms hired "to create what was really not another entity; it was just a name." The Ethics Commission delayed its vote on the matter.

Senator Barack Obama's chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, "moonlights" from his political PR firm AKP&D Message & Media. Working from the same office, "Axelrod operates a second business, ASK Public Strategies, that discreetly plots strategy and advertising campaigns for corporate clients," reports Howard Wolinsky. Axelrod's ASK partners are John Kupper and Eric Sedler, previously of AT&T and Edelman. Chicago Alder Brendan Reilly called ASK "the gold standard in Astroturf organizing." In 2005, as ComEd was "preparing to ask [Illinois] state regulators for higher electricity prices," ASK advised the company to form "Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity." The front group, which described itself as "a coalition of individuals, businesses and organizations," funded ads that warned of blackouts unless rates were raised. Around the same time, ASK helped Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden, oppose the New York Jets's plans to build a new stadium in Manhattan. Cablevision formed the "New York Association for Better Choices," and ran anti-stadium ads in its name. ASK's other work includes helping AT&T defend municipal broadband referenda.

In the spring of 2007, when author Ted Nace set out to profile the emerging No New Coal Plants movement for Orion magazine, he had no idea that the assignment would turn into more than just a single article.

Nace had become interested in the anti-coal movement after reading an article in The Nation magazine, in which NASA's chief climate scientist James E. Hansen warned that another decade of continued growth in greenhouse gases would "guarantee" enough dramatic climate change to produce what Hansen called "a different planet." Hansen made it clear that the most important step that needed to be taken to avoid such a consequence was an immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power plants.

The Power of the Swarm

As Nace explored the anti-coal movement, he found that some of the most effective work was being done by small, rurally-based, grassroots groups linked together informally through computer networks. His Orion article, "Stopping Coal in Its Tracks," noted that in many cases this decentralized "swarm" had been more militant and more effective than the large groups known as Big Green.

Nace set up the website Coal Moratorium Now! to organize the information he was gathering on coal, then recruited two researchers, Meilin Chin and Michelle Chandra, to help him track down the status of every proposed coal plant they could locate. As word of the coal plants database spread, several people proposed moving it onto a wiki so that it could be more easily accessed and edited by multiple researchers.

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Additional details have surfaced about the story we mentioned last month regarding a corporate-sponsored hoax at Hunter College. The college receives donations from the Coach Corporation, a manufacturer of handbags, shoes and other women's accessories. In particular, Coach funded a "guerrilla marketing" class that "educated" students about the dangers of knockoff products by creating a fictional student named "Heidi Cee" who claimed that she had been conned by a counterfeit Coach handbag. "The professor who taught it says that he was pressured to do so even though he has no expertise in advertising or public relations (he teaches computer graphics) and had ethical qualms about the course," reports Scott Jaschik. "Further, the professor -- and other professors who have investigated the circumstances of the course -- maintain that the professor was required to teach only one side of the issue, had to accept industry officials watching him teach, and had little clout to fight back since he didn't (and still doesn't) have tenure." According to Hunter professor Stuart Ewen, the lessons in deception were designed by Paul Werth Associates, an Ohio-based PR firm working for the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, a Coach-funded organization.

A new "grassroots" farmers group with close ties to Monsanto has been formed to push for bans on labels that notify consumers they are buying milk from cows untreated with artificial bovine growth hormone (RGBH). Monsanto makes RGBH, or Posilac, which is injected into cows to make them produce more milk. The front group American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology (AFACT), which receives funding from Monsanto, was organized by Osborne & Barr, an agri-marketing firm started by two former Monsanto employees in 1988. The founding client of Osborne & Barr was Monsanto. Consultant Monty G. Miller of Estes Park, Colorado, also helped organize AFACT, which was formally launched in California in February 2008. The only contact information AFACT lists on its website is a fax number listed as belonging to "Outer Office." Outer Office provides secretarial and operational support (such as scheduling, newsletters and message-taking) to small consulting businesses. A call to Outer Office seeking the address and telephone contact information for AFACT was not returned.

An article in the Independent links funding for the "2008 International Conference on Climate Change" held in New York earlier this month to tobacco and oil companies. As an earlier Spin noted, the global warming skeptics conference was organized by the Heartland Institute think tank. Heartland has opposed scientific consensus on both secondhand tobacco smoke and climate change. Heartland claims on its website that no energy industry money was used to support the conference, but did not address tobacco industry funding. Still, a substantial number of conference sponsors -- including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Independent Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, Frontiers of Freedom and Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy -- have received support from energy or tobacco companies, or both. The Heartland Institute itself has received funding from Exxon and Philip Morris.

The Heartland Institute's "2008 International Conference on Climate Change" in New York was "a sort of global warming doppelganger conference, where everything was reversed," reports Juliet Eilperin. At the event, skeptics unveiled their response to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) report, edited by corporate-funded skeptic Fred Singer, argued that "recent climate change stems from natural causes." Eilperin notes that "while the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists." The New York Times reports that while the Heartland conference "was largely framed around science ... when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so." The conference invitation identified its goal as "to generate international media attention to the fact that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science." The Heartland Institute offered "$1,000 to those willing to give a talk," and "a free weekend at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan, including travel costs, to all elected officials wanting to attend," according to the RealClimate blog.

R.J. Reynolds (RJR) may be funding a South Carolina anti-tax group to oppose a cigarette tax for health care. The Cover Carolina Collaborative, a group of health care organizations, is proposing that the state's tax be raised to $1.00 a pack, to help cover uninsured employees. South Carolina currently has the lowest cigarette tax in the nation, at seven cents a pack. The South Carolina Association of Taxpayers (SCAT) mailed out 10,000 postcards to Republican activists. The postcards call the measure a "$190 million unfunded taxpayer mandate" and urge recipients to "stop this HillaryCare styled welfare plan." South Carolina Senate staffers say a chart on the postcard is the same as one that RJR lobbyists previously showed state senators. RJR refused to say whether they are funding the SCAT anti-tax group. A member of the Cover Carolina Collaborative said, "If R.J. Reynolds wants to come out and oppose it, come out and oppose it, but don't hide behind the faces of taxpayers."

"It's our job to keep coal at the table. It's not there now," said Bob Henrie, a principal in the Salt Lake-based advertising and public relations firm R&R Partners. In September last year, Henrie's firm won the contract with the National Mining Association and other mining industry lobby groups to develop a $35 million advertising campaign aimed at improving the coal mining industry's image. The ads are being run by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a front group which initially had its domain name registered by the coal industry trade organization, the Center for Energy and Economic Development. Late last year an analysis of ABEC's claims, published by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, accused the front group of having a "dirty agenda," running "dirty ads" and using "dirty political targeting" to promote "dirty lies." In his biographical note, Henrie boasts that he was once the chief of staff of the House Mines and Mining Subcommittee which involved him working "to protect vital mining legislation."