20 June - 26 June 1996
Each week McSpotlight will be updated on how the world's press has covered McLibel, McDonald's and multinationals in general.
There were 212 official entries for this year's WWW-jury, and to that each juror added some pages of his or her own to be reviewed. The awards will be presented in September this year.
The McSpotlight Guided Tour has won an honorary mention, in the category 'new documentary form'.
On their homepage (http://prixars.orf.at) the full list of winners and honorary mentions is available.
Here's what the jury wrote about McSpotlight:
HONORARY MENTIONS - New Documentary Form:
McSpotlight
http://www.mcspotlight.org/ or
[http://www.mcspotlight.org/tours/]
In relation to a lawsuit McDonald's started against two people they accused of libel when they criticised McDonald's policy - a lawsuit now becoming famous as the 'McLibel suit' - and in the aftermath of an extensive use of mailing lists by a group of supporting critics, a huge website has now been erected.
The most interesting feature of this site is how they use technology as a new way to present criticism. Using the frames option that Netscape has, they use McDonald's own corporate website as one of their sources. On one side of your screen you have McDonald's shiny, expensive website, and on the other you have a detailed deconstruction and criticism from McSpotlight. There's even an audio file that will help you along this guided tour of McDonald's.
In the opposing McLibel pages, McDonald's carefully constructed PR is taken apart word by word. McSpotlight contains 25 Mb of detailed information about McDonald's, and add links to scientific reports and witness statements.
Not long ago painters such as Picasso, Soutine and Modigliani used to shop for brushes and paints in the 150-year-old Left Bank building at the junction where the artists suppliers, Lefevre-Foinet, kept a store that served as a secret wartime warehouse to hide masterpieces from the marauding Germans.
But if Paris city council approves a building permit on Monday, the United States hamburger firm will hang up it's giant M over Picasso's ghost, winning partial revenge for a rare planning setback when it was refused the go-ahead for a fast food restaurant under the Eiffel Tower.
The Vavin-Brea building was put on sale by the heirs to the artists suppliers but no one paid much notice when a buyer promised to turn the ground floor into a bookshop, befire abandoning the plan in favour of a village-style bistro. The mayor of the 15th arrondissement, Jean-Pierre Lecoq, approved the change, only to find that the restaurant licence had been handed on to McDonald's.
"When I heard the news, I immediately alertded the local association which was set up in 1995 to protect the site," he said.
But Montparnasse residents, who recently ensured that the nearby Coupole cafe was renovated in identical pre-war style, are determined to do better than Hampstead dwellers who lost a 10 year battle to resist an invasion led by the white-faced Ronald the clown.
The Left Bank area has much the same literary heritage as the London suburb. Steeped in cultural nostalgia, the Vavin-Brea junction is within a short walk of the Montparnasse cemetery where writers including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are buried.
After an anti-hamburger petition was signed by 16,000 people, about 500 turned up outside the threatened building for a demonstration in which a huge McDonald-yellow banner was strung up to display the slogan: "Save our heritage."
The protest leader, Patrick Moreaud, said his followers could not understand why it was necessary to add to McDonald's French empire by an act that amounted to artistic and urban sacrilege. Another organiser, Julia Czergo, alleged that McDonald's had used subterfuge and a front man to sneak under local environmentalists' guard.
Socialist city councillors in Paris have taken up the campaign in readiness for a debate on Monday, but past attempts to stop McDonald's from taking over prime tourist sites on the Champs Elysees and settle on noble squares in Lyon and Toulouse have failed.
Despite a constant outpouring of official, elitist and gourmet contempt for the hamburger, 80 per cent of McDonald's customers in France are French. There is nothing here like the British McLibel case, and although there have been many attempts to allege that working practices exploit part-time employees, few rows like the sacking of the Kent girl for eating too many McNuggets have reached the press.
And, despite high level government intervention to protect the purity of the French language, even on the Rive Gauche, a Big Mac will still be called a Big Mac.
A McDonald's spokesman said "People will find the real facts and figures about McDonald's from our Internet pages. We regret that there should be an inaccurate version, but as the Internet cannot be controlled, it's difficult to do anything about it."
...By May of this year, it had been assumed most of the significant rainforest evidence had already been heard. Although establishing that the Corporation's statements were inconsistent with practice, would it convince the judge of a direct involvement in rainforest destruction? Then, on one day at the end of May, an additional witness unexpectedly delivered a killer punch.
The telling testimony came from Sue Brandford, an expert on the Amazon region, and currently working for the BBC World Service. Her powerful eye witness accounts of rainforest destruction included regions of Brazil only recently disclosed as sources of McDonald's beef. Brandford described how the cattle ranching industry had caused widespread environmental damage to the area and had violently displaced small farmers and indigenous peoples.
In the freshly disclosed document, Roberto Morganti, director of McDonald's local hamburger manufacturers Braslo Ltd, stated that the Corporation still purchases meat from several collection points in the Goias region, specifically along the banks of the River Araguaia and its tributaries.
Brandford told the court that this region had consisted almost entirely of tropical rainforest in the 1970s but she had witnessed its systematic clearance by cattle ranchers from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. She said forest clearances still continue in this region today. After three years of pushing McDonald's to disclose documents on Brazilian beef, it is an irony McDonald's are unlikely to appreciate, that the Goias document was disclosed two days before Brandford's appearance in court.
For McDonald's, this testimony was a last minute nightmare. However, for the McLibel Defendants it was the powerful primary evidence they had been looking to sew up what had already been established in the trial so far.
The subject on which it was thought hardest to clearly demonstrate corporate culpability has consequently turned into one of the strongest areas in the long running saga of careful truth extraction."
