Corporate Whore Rick Berman Smacked Down by Court for Anti-Health Care Ad

[babylonsister]

http://workinprogress.firedoglake.com/2009/12/18/corporate-whore-rick-berman-smacked-down-by-court-for-anti-health-care-ad/

Corporate Whore Rick Berman Smacked Down by Court for Anti-Health Care Ad
By: Michael Whitney Friday December 18, 2009 11:30 am


It’s nice to see the purveyors of corporate activism get their comeuppance.

A federal court ordered the latest Rick Berman front group to take down its anti-healthcare ad because of trademark violations. Berman’s group falsely claimed several doctors’ groups opposed “government health care,” and those groups weren’t too happy.

The American College of Surgeons filed a complaint in Illinois’ Northern District alleging that the Employee Freedom Action Committee — one of a host of groups run by lobbyist Rick Berman — had violated trademark law and defamed the group by including the College of Surgeons on a scrolling list headed “Doctors Against the Plan.”

A plastic surgeons’ group also complained of the ad, which was based on a December 1 letter from surgical associations saying they opposed the bill as it was then written; the groups now say they’re waiting to see its final form. A Berman aide argued that the ad accurately characterized the groups’ positions.

The ad was run by the “Committee to Rethink Reform,” a 501(c)4 not required to disclose its donors.

While the ad has been removed from the front group’s YouTube channel, you can see the original version above.

Chalk this incident up as yet another blatantly false attack from Rick Berman, who major corporations use as their sock puppet to push ideas like “pregnant women shouldn’t worry about eating mercury,” “secondhand smoke doesn’t cause cancer,” and “we should lower the drunk driving levels because it’s not really a big deal.” While those aren’t direct quotes, the ideas have all been advocated by Berman or his front groups.

Case in point: the spokeswoman Berman trotted out to defend this blatantly false ad, Sarah Longwell, is also the same spokesperson he uses to defend the tanning bed industry.

Update: the copied video has also been removed, but you can still see the still above.

[KharmaTrain]

1. Just A Slap On The Hand...

Facts mean nothing to a slime merchant like Berman. He'll just "repackage" his venom, make up another front group and away he goes again. The game here is to get a message out and have it echoed...and that has been done. No one is going to care that his "facts" are lies, no one will hear about this verdict and Berman pays no real price. All in the name of "free speech".

[Berry Cool]

2. This is why one component of every American education should be

extensive study of the mass media and the ways they work--so that generations of kids don't grow up unquestioningly thinking that anything anyone publishes in a book, slaps up on a Web site, says on TV, etc., is true.

At one point or another in life, we all learned to make the basic distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, the news articles and the editorials, the program and the commercials. Of course, a lot of effort has been exerted to melt/mess up/eliminate those boundaries in the time since. Everyone needs to grow up today with a rudimentary understanding of lobbying groups and special-interest organizations and learn to determine which ones are promulgating facts and which ones lies in order to support a commercial enterprise.