AR-News: (AU/UK/US) The Man Who Ate McDonald's Faces Corporate Backlash

[animalconcerns at fastmail.us]

When Morgan Spurlock stuffed himself with junk food until his doctors
begged him to stop, he threw an industry into a super-size crisis. Now a
fierce corporate counter-attack has begun.
...
To say this is a public relations disaster for McDonald's is a gross
understatement. It is a nightmare that shows no signs of ending.
Spurlock has - almost literally - regurgitated the contents of his
high-fat, high-sugar diet on to the collective desks of McDonald's
management, and they appear to be at a loss as to what to do about it.

For the first five weeks, they restricted their responses to little more
than a generic observation that overeating is bad on any diet. No doubt
they reasoned that kicking up a bigger fuss would generate further
publicity for the movie. But that hush-hush strategy clearly has not
worked, and the company has now begun to fight back in more vigorous
fashion. The chosen battleground is not the US but Australia, where
Super Size Me was released earlier this month and broke national box
office records with its opening weekend receipts.

"If someone from America produces a film, and then comes out to
Australia and attacks us, I'm not going to take that sitting down," the
chief executive of McDonald's Australia, Guy Russo, said earlier this
week. 
...
To date, McDonald's has not challenged the factual content of Super Size
Me, only its point of view and interpretation. But that, too, could be
about to change, after Mr Russo complained in an interview with Sky TV
that Spurlock was "providing false claims to Australians".

He did not spell out what those false claims might be, and both Spurlock
and the film's Australian publicists have taken great pleasure in
pointing out that Mr Russo's opinions on the point appear to have
undergone a radical change. "Less than two weeks ago when I was in
Brisbane," Spurlock shot back a few days ago, "he and I did an interview
together on a radio station where he said the movie was important
because it highlighted the obesity epidemic."

Whatever the rights and wrongs of these points of view, it is clear that
a propaganda war is in progress, and that something made Mr Russo decide
that playing nice wasn't working. But playing nasty is having boomerang
effects of its own. 

full story:
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/20/5917750

*** NEWS recently added on Animalconcerns -- added throughout the day
without posting to e-mail lists!  (Looking for something to post to your
e-mail lists?):

NANNY 'SMEARED' - New York Post

Montana program to be pitched for national livestock security - Casper
Star Tribune

FBI accused of 'scare' tactics - Press Herald

The Man Who Ate McDonald's Faces Corporate Backlash - Infoshop News

----------
Your Portal to Animal Concerns Forum (discussion board), More News Headlines, AR-News on the Web, Events, E-Mail Lists, Jobs, and Organizations! Try searching for the news item on Animalconcerns! http://www.animalconcerns.org/