The daughter of Rupert Murdoch has recently been appointed a Trustee of the Tate in succession to Jon Snow. During the latter's term the Tate received plenty of publicity on Channel 4 News. Some Tate publicity has been wildly inaccurate (such as the front page headlines in The Independent that it had discovered thousands of works by Turner, which was wildly untrue). The journalists involved avoided responding and the papers published no corrections. Some may assume that art museums are generally ethical and have little to gain by managing the news. How wrong they are!

Freelance writer Nicola Cutcher sent this message, which links to a piece she wrote for Comment Is Free, at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/23/iraq

In Australia we are yet to feel the complete savagery of the medical profession's insatiable desire for personal wealth. There is no better place to see this in action than in debates, discussions or news release about health insurance.

The specialists and hospitals funded by 'private' sources have a vested interest in ruling the roost. They start by assuming that any form of public health can not be as 'good' as what can be provided by private enterprise. But you have to pay for the best.

Here's a link to a very interesting and revealing investigation by the New York Times which uncovers the way in which the US media have been using supposedly independent military experts to analyse news stories a) generally without disclosing that these experts work for military contractors who have a commercial interest in the activities they are covering, and b) apparently without realising that these experts have been briefed and substantially misled by the Pentagon. As the New York Times puts it: "A Pentagon information apparatus...

"Sport has become little more than a marketing tool for goods and services... What happens now is that where newspapers have cut their budgets, they have made the photographers part of that. They therefore rely on free photographs because they won't even pay the agencies for their photographs. The people who provide these photographs are paid by the public relations agencies for the events we are covering... What they are told to take is photographs which contain prominently the brand name or logo of the sponsor of that event.