Propaganda vs news
p2pnet.net OT News:- They call it ‘fake news’. But it’s all the same – cons developed by venal marketeers who use equally unscrupulous corporate news outlets to try to scam you into buying, or using, stuff you don’t want and don’t need.
Video news releases, are packaged stories paid for by businesses or interest groups, says the CBC. They use actors to portray reporters and use the same format as television news stories, but the US Federal Communications Commission has mailed letters to at least 42 stations asking station managers about agreements between the station and the creators of the video news releases, says the story, going on:
The action follows an April report on fake TV news by two media watchdog groups, the Center for Media Democracy in Wisconsin and Free Press in Northampton, Maryland. They recorded incidents where video news releases had been used at 77 stations in a study titled Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed.
Some fake news items ran without viewers being told they’d been created by an outside group and, “You can’t tell anymore the difference between what’s propaganda and what’s news,” FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein is quoted as saying.
An item on ethanol plants, created by a public relations firm on behalf of Siemens AG, a corporation with a financial stake in the construction of ethanol plants, aired on a Louisiana station and in another case, a Boston station edited and re-voiced a video segment produced by an outside company on behalf of Toshiba, Fisher-Price and Scholastic, whose kids’ products were featured in it, says the CBC.
The item ran at Christmas, without any indication to viewers it had been created as a news release.
The FCC has asked stations whether any “consideration” was given to them in return for airing the material, the story adds.
Also See:
CBC – FCC probes ‘fake news’ at U.S. TV stations, August 16, 2006
PC World – Apple Boot Camp Update, August 16, 2006
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August 17th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
I like the little bit at the end…
The FCC has asked stations whether any “consideration” was given to them in return for airing the material, the story adds.
Honest, FCC, these guys were gonna advertise with us anyway. Look here’s the contracts from way before the piece was put on the news.
What’s that? White-out?
Yeah, we had a thing where people were putting the wrong month on contracts, writing 12 instead of 6. So we had to white it out and fix… I mean CORRECT it.
Yeah, funny.
One of our salesman actually wrote December in the middle of May. I guess he was thinking about the holidays a bit early.