A group calling itself Stop Propaganda — Insist on Truth claims it took over the lobby of local NBC affiliate WMTV-Madison Tuesday afternoon.

About 20 members of the group acted out what they called a “theatrical protest” by dressing as U.N. weapons inspectors and conducting mock inspections for what they say are “weapons of mass deception.”

Jason Effinger, an NBC-15 employee, refused to comment on the incident.

“We’re a private business, and what goes on in such a business is meant to be kept private,” Effinger said.

Ross Collin, a University of Wisconsin student and spokesman for SPIT, said the group stayed in the lobby until the police arrived and arrested five members of the organization. He said “weapons of mass deception” was a bad pun.

“It was just this particular protest; we decided to have a theatrical element to it,” Collin said. “We thought by doing that we might be able to attract more attention to our cause than we would by, for example, a letter to the editor.”

Collin said the main goal of SPIT is not to replace biased coverage in the media with liberal antiwar sentiment, but rather to envision a democratic media with a strong sphere of voices from every perspective. SPIT has focused its attentions on biased media coverage of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the Enron scandal in the past.

Collin said 17 of the 20 people involved in the protest were UW students.

The SPIT protest was in part motivated by information gathered by Analyzing Media Perspectives, a media watchdog group founded by UW graduate students in September 2002.

“They’ve used our data as justification for their actions,” said Denise St. Clair, a UW doctoral student who worked on the project.

Since Sept. 13, 2002, the day President Bush first addressed the United Nations to ask them to take action against Iraq, AMP has analyzed news sources from 14 countries. AMP advocates media consumers obtaining their news from a broad range of international sources.

“AMP is a media literacy organization. We are not for or against war,” St. Clair said. “Unfortunately, so many people in the U.S. don’t have the time to do anything more than glance at a headline or turn on a network news station for a few minutes a day.”