"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."

Global warming skeptic William Gray, from the TCS Daily VNR

A White House "personnel announcement" states: "The President intends to nominate James K. Glassman, of Connecticut, to be a Member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, for the remainder of a three-year term expiring 8/13/07 and an additional three-year term expiring 8/13/10." President Bush will also nominate Glassman to be BBG Chair. Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank, the author of the wildly inaccurate book "Dow 36000," and the founder of Tech Central Station (TCS), a corporate-sponsored news and opinion site published by the Republican-associated lobbying firm DCI Group until last year. TCS has been accused of "journo-lobbying" or online fake news, for its tendency to not fully disclose its corporate sponsors (which often have a direct financial stake in the issues covered on the site). TCS also runs "TCS Daily," which received significant funding from ExxonMobil and paid for a video news release denying the evidence that global warming is causing more severe hurricane seasons. If confirmed by the Senate, Glassman would replace controversial BBG Chair Kenneth Tomlinson.

From a Nuclear Energy Institute ad

"We just find it maddening that Hill & Knowlton, which has an $8 million account with the nuclear industry, should have such an easy time working the press," concluded the Columbia Journalism Review in an editorial in its July / August 2006 issue.

The magazine was rightly bemoaning the tendency of news outlets to present former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore and former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman as environmentalists who support nuclear power, without noting that both are paid spokespeople for a group bankrolled by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). NEI represents nuclear power plant operators, plant designers, fuel suppliers and other sectors of the nuclear power industry. Hill & Knowlton is NEI's public relations firm, though it's not the only firm working to build support for nuclear power.

Thanks in part to an ongoing, multifaceted PR push -- along with very real concerns about energy prices, rising energy demand, aging infrastructure, sustainability and global warming -- nuclear power is attracting serious attention from reporters and policymakers alike. The question is whether a vital public debate over energy choices is being skewed by deep-pocketed interests with a dog in the fight.

The dangers of such distortions are especially acute at the state and local levels. That's where efforts to extend the licenses of existing nuclear power plants, to maintain or expand nuclear waste storage facilities, and to site new proposed nuclear power plants, are made or broken. And that's where pro-nuclear campaigners appear to be focusing, adopting the mantle and tactics of community groups while steadfastly refusing to provide details on their operations.