It's no secret that polls are used to shape public opinion at least as much as they're used to measure it. The website of one major U.S. polling firm, the Mellman Group, boasts its "extensive experience developing effective communications strategies that lead people to choose our client's product or service, join their organization, hold their opinion, or vote as we would like."

Polling was used as a perception management tactic in the national debate over the children's health insurance program known as SCHIP. As President Bush prepared to veto an SCHIP reauthorization bill, Republican strategists worried about the impact on their party. Republican pollster David Winston came up with a solution: present the party's opposition as an attempt to "'put poor kids first' rather than expand coverage to adults, illegal immigrants and those already with insurance," reported the Wall Street Journal. "Independents favored that message 47%-38%." The veto went ahead, with the "poor kids first" theme figuring prominently in Republican talking points and briefing materials, such as the White House's "Five Key Myths About President Bush's Support for SCHIP Reauthorization."

Polls are also frequently employed as part of a "bandwagon" strategy: most people support (or oppose) this, so you should support (or oppose) this, too. Last year, a poll purported to show strong opposition to "net neutrality," the principle that networks should provide access to any data, without discrimination. But the poll questions were highly leading, asking participants whether they preferred "new TV and video choice" and "lower prices for cable TV," or "barring high speed internet providers from offering specialized services." The poll was funded by Verizon Communications, which opposes net neutrality.

Another telecom-related poll was unveiled last month at a press conference in Madison, Wisconsin. According to a press release (PDF) put out by the newly-formed Wisconsin Video Choice Coalition, "Wisconsin residents across demographic, geographic and party lines overwhelmingly support a state bill that would encourage competition to cable TV."

By all accounts, the legislation in question is controversial. Why, then, did the poll find such strong support for it?

The New York Times today published an op-ed piece blasting research that tests the comparative effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. The piece failed to mention that its author, Peter Pitts, is a senior vice president at the PR firm of Manning, Selvage and Lee. Pitts has a history of flacking as an attack dog for the pharmaceutical industry and currently heads a pharma front group called the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. Physician Roy M. Poses of the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine has written a critique of the "slippery slope" rhetoric in Pitts' editorial. "It is disappointing that a newspaper as influential as the New York Times would publish a health policy article without disclosing all the author's relevant financial interests, particularly one so relevant and direct," Poses adds. "Fostering more stealth health policy advocacy in ever more influential venues will just make the already confusing clamor about health care and its reform even muddier."

Nuclear Energy Institute coaster"If we are going to seriously address our energy needs as well as our concerns about global climate change, one source stands out -- nuclear," writes Christine Todd Whitman in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's one of two recent op/eds by the former EPA administrator (the other was in BusinessWeek) that fail to disclose that Whitman is a paid consultant for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). Patrick Moore, Whitman's co-chair of the NEI-funded "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition," has also been busy, promoting nuclear power in Michigan. "Nuclear energy is the key," Moore told a Grand Rapids audience. Meanwhile, in Britain, environmental groups have dismissed a public consultation on nuclear power as a "public relations stitch-up" by the pro-nuclear government. This is the second consultation on the issue; Greenpeace won a legal challenge against the first. Liberal Democrat Sir Menzies Campbell accused the UK government of "making up its mind on nuclear power long before this latest consultation had even begun," reports the BBC.

"If I had to do it all over again, I don't think I would use the Ontario system," said Canadian cancer patient Lindsay McGreith. "I would get my wife to drive me to Buffalo, because I know in Buffalo you'd get looked after, whereas here you'd just sit for seven and a half hours. ... Our system is lousy." McGreith's comments are in a soundbite and B-roll video package (basically, an unassembled video news release) distributed by the PR firm MultiVu and funded by Health Care America, which is funded in part by pharmaceutical and hospital companies. It's part of an organized industry response to the Michael Moore movie "Sicko." Another MultiVu fake news video, which was funded by America's Health Insurance Plans, promotes a "public-private" health care system and decries Moore's single-payer proposal as an unpopular, "simplistic" and unrealistic "public takeover of the healthcare system."

PR Watch has exposed the antics of Steven ("the Junkman") Milloy more times than we can stand to remember, as he flacks for the tobacco industry, speaks up for asbestos, and attacks environmentalists as "terrorists" and "fear profiteers." Nowadays he writes a column for Fox News, where he is helping publicize a PR stunt concocted by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), an industry front group that is threatening to sue Whole Foods for baking bread which (like all bread) contains trace amounts of acrylamide, a probable carcinogen that ACSH says is harmless. (Milloy and ACSH haven't always been this chummy. ACSH director Elizabeth Whelan, who disagrees with Milloy's defense of secondhand cigarette smoke, once accused him of "junking all science.")