PML: Trade associations toss more money into lobbying feds

From the Political Money Line:

National Trade Associations Increase Lobby $
8/16/2006

Lobbying expenditure reports from organizations that lobbied the legislative and executive braches of the Federal government during the first six months of 2006 are starting to become available to the public. The filing date for reports was August 14th.

Major increases in spending were reported by the US Telecom Association, the Chamber of Commerce of the U.S., the National Association of Realtors, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Top tier spending was reported by the following organizations:

• US Telecom Assn. $15,280,000 (up from $5,340,000 spent in the last 6 months of 2005)
• Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. $14,300,000 (up from $10,540,000)

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The end of the world is here, Part II

There, parked on the June cover of Vanity Fair, is the newsman of the Rave New World, Anderson Cooper. The text associated with his name reads: “A heartbreaking memoir … The shock of his brother’s suicide; the horror of Katrina.”

The subhead on the Salon.com story says: “Star newsman Anderson Cooper is defined less by his experience than by an old-fashioned Hollywood marketing campaign.” [emphasis added] That’s not news to people these days. He’s more apt to be praised because of his empathetic style rather than his journalistic substance.

But Neal Gabler’s fine piece is more about what Cooper represents than about Cooper himself. As Gabler says, “CNN obviously has invested a great deal in its new wonder boy, and the network has been marketing him aggressively, though no more so than CBS is marketing its new anchor, Katie Couric. In doing so, however, CNN is not just boosting an anchor. It is changing the very paradigm of television news.”