The Center for Media and Democracy reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Center for Media and Democracy

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) was founded in 1993 by environmentalist writer and political activist John Stauber. It publishes PR Watch, edited by Sheldon Rampton. It has published several books describing what it calls the murky world of public relations. The organization presents itself as a media research group.

Disinfopedia

The Disinfopedia is a CMD project - a WikiWiki based on the MediaWiki software, which was initially developed for Wikipedia. It describes itself as a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.

Disinfopedia was started on 15 January 2003 and publicly launched on 10 March 2003. The directory launched with approximately 200 articles, and as of July 2004 it has over 5000 articles. It is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, just like Wikipedia.

Criticism of the founders

Some dispute the nonpartisan sounding characterization, citing a recent work by Stauber and Rampton. In their coauthored 2004 book, Banana Republicans, the two claim that the United States is becoming a one-party state, ruled by conservative Republicans.

Stauber and Rampton allege that right wing Republicans are in the process of imposing upon the United States, "hierarchical, command-driven social systems...notorious for their tendency to make disastrous decisions." They liken the conservative Republican's domestic policy agenda to the cultural revolution in China, and to the economic plans implemented the Soviet Union, both carried out by totalitarian communist regimes during the height of the Cold War. They liken the conservative Republican's foreign policy agenda to those of Napoleon and Hitler.

Critics of the organization have called such claims both untrue and absurd. They allege that the posture of a research group, which both the organization and its Wiki-based website Disinfopedia assume, is a sham.

External links

• Disinfopedia
• http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/index.html
  • "a nonprofit, public interest organization dedicated to investigative reporting on the public relations industry. The Center serves citizens, journalists, and researchers seeking to recognize and combat manipulative and misleading PR practices."

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