CBS News�Protecting the Family When is Conflict of Interest OK?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) October 25, 2006 -- CBS News�Protecting the Family

When is Conflict of Interest OK?

Just as product placements are common in entertainment shows, integrating �co-op advertising� into news items for political allies and VIP sponsors has become common fare within the four Network News Divisions, and especially at CBS.

While the quid pro quo arrangements don�t surface with scandals as huge as Dan Rather�s travails with the Air National Guard, still there have been exposures. Memorable is CBS News Executive Producer Susan Zirinsky�s collusion, with News President Andrew Heyward, to clamp down on news story follow-ups concerning Nike�s Viet Nam labor practices scandal, traded in for the simultaneous mockery of CBS News personnel wearing Nike logos on-air for their sponsor in Nagano.

This tendency of CBS is reflected in a recent production, soon to be aired on Zirinsky�s �48 Hours.� Not only will one of CBS�s largest corporate sponsors get special treatment (the pharmaceuticals industry), but Zirinsky�s family business gets to hide behind her special treatment of a singular incident. While this report isn�t as high profile, or capable of changing the outcome of an election, it is nevertheless sobering in its implications.

According to the promo on their website, �Peter Van Sant examines a March 2003 murder that doctors say might never have occurred if Jeremy Perkins, a 28-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, had received proper treatment to control his psychotic delusions...� The report will assault a religious creed and pillory its adherents while impertinently advocating the supremacy of institutional psychiatry and the drugs they push, a movement termed a pseudo-science by its critics.

Hidden fact #1: According to TNS Media Intelligence, CBS received nearly $600,000,000 in pharmaceutical ad revenues in 2005, the most of any network. News stories reflecting scientific studies into the increase in suicides, increase in violence, etc. due to psycho-active pharmaceuticals, and performance rates lower than placebos, are not done by CBS.

Hidden fact #2: �48 Hours� Executive Producer, Susan Zirinsky has long acted with an insiders interest for the commercial mental health industry. 1) Her parents built, owned and ran Gracie Square Hospital, one of the largest privately owned psychiatric hospitals in the United States. 2) She has hidden such activities as Gracie Square conducting race based ECT experiments on patients for an 18 month period in 1999 and 2000. 3) Other conflicts of interest, precluding fairness in portraying any mental health position�Zirinskys� husband, Joseph Peyronnin, CBS News Vice President through the mid 90�s, is a Mental Health Association Honoree, given at a 2004 New York City gala, emceed by Lesley Stahl of CBS�s "60 Minutes".

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