Corporate Propaganda Still On the News

mofomojo writes, "Democracy Now! reports that a new study by the Center for Media and Democracy says Americans are still being shown corporate public relations videos disguised as news reports on newscasts across the country. In April, the Center identified 77 stations using Video News Releases in their newscasts; the findings led to an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission. A followup study has found that 10 of those stations are still airing VNRs today, for a new total of 46 stations in 22 states." From the article: "Most of the VNRs have aired on stations owned by large media conglomerates such as News Corp., Tribune, and Disney. They've also been sponsored by some of the country's biggest corporations including General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, and Allstate Insurance."

Are these like Slashvertisments?

Adverts disguised as stories?

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For that matter, what is this story except a regurgitated press release from one of "the country's biggest" political non-profits?

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Most news is wire stories and press releases. That it is expected to be any different for television news is a bizarre concept.

--
Evan

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I'm afraid the BBC has as many dirty tricks up their sleeve as anyone... they just choose to be more conservative with how and when they use them. I trust no major media company whatsoever.

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Alternatively, I could turn this around and say that typically people who aren't pro-Palestine hate the place because it's "full of Arabs".

-OR-

It could also be because you disagree with how Israel handles conflict with Palestinians and has nothing to d

Re:Are these like Slashvertisments?

Yes, but these are worse.

Slashdot editors don't check the affiliations of people who submit stories, and allow anonymous submissions, so Slashvertisements are possible. However, I don't think anyone expects anything different. The submitters are named, or the story starts "An anonymous reader writes...", and readers are left to draw their own conclusions about any potential bias.

On the other hand, news channels don't take submissions from just anyone when they make news stories. They're supposed to be deciding what to air themselves, with the aim of informing their viewers. If they use a corporate PR video that looks like a news report, they ought to know the source; the problem is when they deliberately fail to declare who made it, as this means that they are disguising advertisements as news.

Let me be..

.. the first one to say DUH

Better than government news stories

I've seen a few of these fake corporate news stories, and usually it's pretty obvious that the story came from a company (particularly for regular viewers, since the local news reporters are typically not involved). As sneaky as this is though, I'd much rather watch corporate ads disguised as news than government propaganda disguised as news [independent.co.uk], something the current administration has been found to do.

Either way, it's pretty sneaky and low.

Re:Better than government news stories

As sneaky as this is though, I'd much rather watch corporate ads disguised as news than government propaganda disguised as news

What have you got, then?

Well there's news, propaganda and news, news news ads and propaganda, propaganda news ads and propaganda, news news ads ads and propaganda, and propaganda news and ads...

Have you got anything without propaganda in it?

Well, there's news news ads and propaganda. That's not got much propaganda in it.

I don't want any propaganda!

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Well there's news, propaganda and news, news news ads and propaganda, propaganda news ads and propaganda, news news ads ads and propaganda, and propaganda news and ads...

Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam;

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How dare you express such insubordination toward our rightful superiors?

Don't you realize that they have our best interests at heart? Those kind leaders, in government and industry alike, seek naught but to guide us gently along the correct path.

Without s

Re:Better than government news stories

...usually it's pretty obvious that the story came from a company...

The problem is: how do you know?
 
Perhaps you only notice the poorly-done ones. After all, it's common to have radio DJs do spots for local businesses, which also is clearly an ad. But it's also common for DJs to work product mentions into the morning banter. The same applies to TV: how can you tell if that news segment on the local Coke plant was just a random filler or an ad placement by the bottler? What's the difference?

Re:Better than government news stories

Can they take this out of the magazines too? This kind of stuff really bugs me. They look like articles, and take up 4-5 pages in a magazine, but except for the word "Advertisement" appearing in small at the top of the article, they look just like articles. I can understand this happening in crappy tabloids, but I see it more often in news magazines. It's really quite terrible when companies try to hide their articles under the guise of a magazine article. It's deceiving to the public, and it makes it really annoying to try to find the real articles in a magazine.

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Some people are so fearful of the ghost of socialism that they can't see that their government has become little more than an an oligarchy controlled by the rich elite. The fact that you get so much of your news from News Corporation should be a strong hi

Corporations == 21st Century Barons

Has anyone else noticed that at every turn corporations again and again attempt to subvert the powers of the state and twist both public opinion and the law to their own benefit. In many cases, large corporations behave like small, independant countries or baronies, accountable to no one but themselves and largely immune from reprecussion. Only the state can realistically challenge their authority, and even then only with considerable effort and expense.

The situation in many ways resembles the old medieval baronies, who quarralled and feuded amoung themselves, and methaphoricall and literally stamped on the faces of the general population. The state/king had only limited ability to exercise control and essentially each barony was a virtual state within a state. In many cases, different parts of a country could be at war with one another, or with the monarchy.

In case anyone thinks this is a bit far fetched, consider this. What if MegaCorp(TM), drove up to your house one day and towed away your car on some flimsy legal pretense? Barons and Lords did this kind of thing all the time. What can you do? It's getting to the point that the police will not even dare to investigate large corporations with their armies of lawyers. Your ability to conclude a successful suit before you grow old and die is also ever decreasing.

You get a lot of SciFi where in the furture, corporations rule everything. Is this really so far fetched? If they have more de facto power and influence than the nation states in which they reside, then what is to stop them, like the old barons before them, from simply all but forming states of their own? Maybe Richelieu's reforms will be rolled back, just in a different form.

Re:Corporations == 21st Century Barons

You can tell what a society deems the most important based on the size of the buildings erected for it. For much of the Middle Ages, churches would be the largest buildings, with giant cathedrals constructed as demonstrations of the church's power.

At some point following the Renaissance, government buildings became the largest buildings. No longer would the town church be the largest building, but instead the local government building would be the largest. The state had become the largest power.

Who do the largest buildings we erect today represent? The most powerful and important entities create the largest buildings. When you see a city skyline, what makes up most of the largest buildings?

Can you even see city hall in most modern city skylines?

Re:Corporations == 21st Century Barons

Um maybe it isn't what society deems to be the most important, but what has the most money. I wouldn't be surprised if religion used to have the most money, and then government had the most money, and now business has the most money. It takes money to build big buildings!

Re:Corporations == 21st Century Barons

> You can tell what a society deems the most important based on the size of the buildings erected for it.

By that logic, we're clearly a society which places a great deal of importance on aircraft assembly [wikipedia.org].

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"You get a lot of SciFi where in the furture, corporations rule everything. Is this really so far fetched? If they have more de facto power and influence than the nation states in which they reside, then what is to stop them, like the old barons before the

Corporations gaining power == fascism

Most usians may not be familiar with it, but fascism at it's core is the joining of political and corporate powers. Both Italy and Germany in the 30s had huge corporate blocks that had a lot of political power. That may give you some pause next time you see all the 'campaign donations' that flow one way. What do you think flows the other way?

(oh and mods: please show your immaturiy to mod something down when you don't agree with it)

Re:Corporations gaining power == fascism

People don't seem to know that 'fascism' was the socio-economic paradigm of choice in the 20's and 30's. It's equivalent (or nearest) today is the 'free market economy'. Of course you're quite right about the US - the merger of state and corporation is technically fascism (tied together with the biggest propaganda machine the world has ever seen: the media). I think we're just in the 'benign' part of this new fascism and the next 10 years will begin to reveal the more sinister aspects of it.

"The media".... not corporations?

The media, at least mass media, are by their very definition and size required to be corporations by themselves. The difference to "normal" corporations is that the goods they sell are information.

Or opinion.

In a democracy, you cannot rule against the people. Or so you're told in school. Actually, you cannot rule against the public opinion. If that opinion is based on information and facts, and people finding their own opinions, this is actually a good thing.

That's not the reality today, though.

Public opinion is made and shaped by the media. You're told what you're supposed to hear, you're shown what you're supposed to see and more often than not, you're also told what you're supposed to think and believe because "that's the public opinion". To support it you often get to see some statistics that make the statistician in me cringe, because you can see easily how crooked they are sometimes.

And hey, if "the people" believe that, how can it be wrong? 10000 say yes, you say no, now who's more likely wrong? You? Or 10000 others?

There's a carefully crafted and delicate balance of power (and money) between government, corporations and media (corporations). You, the voter, don't matter anymore. You're being shifted around and moved, statistically dissected and examined to see what spin would make you vote this or the other way.

Re:Corporations gaining power == fascism

How he sounds doesn't make it any less true...

I would say the media is an unwitting propaganda machine but a propaganda machine no less. It is a (mostly) free media so there is no reason that any individual cannot use the media for their own propaganda...assuming they can fund their own publicity/marketing department. So the media devolves more or less to be the mouthpiece of those with money (power) - government and coporations.

Those points of view that do not have the resources to outshout other points of view do not get represented.

Corporate campaign contributions

One common myth is that corporations pour millions and millions into a candidate's campaign coffers. But they don't and can't. FEC regulations limit donations from one individual or organization to a given candidate or elected official to $2500 in a cale

Please define 'we'

You had to rescue those nations? How did you do that, go back in time? And now those nations have to pay tribute to you with support for all those other wars your country is diving in?
Pardon me, but have you been drinking the nationalistic-flavoured Kool-a

Governments

Not only can the corporations bully the little guy, they can bully the Government. After all, some of these corporations are global in scale, and have economic resources that dwarf those of many countries. I think that's why Microsoft only got a slap on

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No Microsoft got a slap on the wrist because you had an election at the end of the trial, and the nature of the US elections requires massive amount of money which Microsoft had.

They didn't have to bully anyone, the bought their way out.

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I am an ardent populist and progressive (in the T.R. sense of the word) who's worked at a lot of big corporations in New York. I have to say that looking from the inside and having access to the other side of the table, corporations are not quite the mono

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I know there are a lot of sincere libertarians on this site, and I sympathize with the libertarian idea (breifly, get the government off our backs). But this is what always gets me. If we just deregulate, it leaves a power vacuum, and we're left with the

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You get a lot of SciFi where in the furture, corporations rule everything.

Actually we are already there. Corporate power transcends national boundaries now for instance. When I was growing up I read a great deal of SciFi and it staggers me how much has com

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Thats not totally true. When you have no money, you become a lot more powerful. You have the same amont of influence as someone with very little, but you no longer have the weakness of having something to lose. Take a look at the McLibel case [wikipedia.org]. The defen

national debt anyone?

Build up a large credit card bill and you can find out yourself. It's only when you have no money that you realise how powerless poverty makes you.

You mean like the national debt?

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The fundamental concepts behind Milton Friedman's economics have encouraged the short term, profit-maximizing solutions that are now rampant within the majority of our large corporations. I honestly don't give a damn about the shareholders; the company's d

Real Story...?

Why not link to the the real article [prwatch.org] instead of, or in addition to, the story about the article?

what real news? ..

There isn't any real news. Don't you realize it yet. Stories are generated and fed to the media by the PR departments of the various interests. How it works is a bunch of 'journalists' sit in a room and generate feel good stories about the establishment and negative ones about whoever we happened to be currently at war with. You see it doesn't really matter if what is reported happened, all is required is the 'facts' be spun in favour of the winners. Like when Bush recently legalised the torture of prisoners, NBC reported this as Bush banning torture.

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There isn't any real news. Don't you realize it yet. Stories are generated and fed to the media by the PR departments of the various interests. How it works is a bunch of 'journalists' sit in a room and generate feel good stories about the establishment a

Re:what real news? ..

For anyone who hasn't yet read it, I highly recommend that you read Paul Graham's blog post entitled "The Submarine" [paulgraham.com]. It's a very interesting insight into how PR firms craft the fake news that you describe.

Recycling: Not Just for Evil Corporations

But also for other special interest groups we're supposed to like.

It's nice to see that somebody else finally noticed. Glenn Reynolds was writing about this problem back in 2002:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,42050,00.html [foxnews.com]

Recycling is supposed to be a good thing, so you'd think that media organizations would be proud when they do it. But in fact, they tend to keep it quiet.

I'm not talking about aluminum cans here, but about the tendency of media organizations to turn press releases and written-to-order opinion pieces into apparently objective accounts. This happens all the time, partly because of media laziness, and partly because of ingenuity on the part of the various advocacy groups that depend on media coverage to advance their agendas and promote their fundraising campaigns.

The first part of this formula, media laziness, was demonstrated by journalism students here at the University of Tennessee a few years ago. They produced a fake press release for a non-existent student group opposed to political correctness and sent it to various news organizations. Some ran the item; some even embellished the report of an event that never happened with additional details that weren't in the phony press release. None called the contact number (which was genuine) or did anything else to check its validity. Yet when they were exposed, their response was to call the experiment "unethical."

http://instapundit.com/archives/021755.php [instapundit.com]

News stories, to a degree seldom appreciated by the general public, are often the product of press releases generated by trade associations and interest groups. Often those releases are converted into news stories by the simple expedient of placing a reporter's byline on top. Television news stories (especially those appearing on local stations) are often supplied fully produced, with blank spots left for the local news reporter to insert commentary that makes the story appear his or her own. Opinion columns are often "placed" by businesses or interest groups to support a particular point of view -- often, they are even written by those groups and then run with the byline of distinguished individuals, or even regular commentators, who have barely read the piece, much less written it. Indeed, the Sasso "attack video" was something of this sort, for the journalists who broke the Biden/Kinnock story did not at first disclose their source.

Most readers and viewers have small appreciation of how little of what they see on television or read in newspapers and magazines is original with the reporters, editors, and producers involved. Yet in fact news organizations are highly dependent on predigested information from public relations firms, government officials, and advocacy groups, information that is often passed on to their readers and viewers with no indication that it is not original. That problem is not new, but it has gotten worse in recent years. . . .

Although a "video news release" is still more expensive to produce than a standard paper press release, they have become much more common. According to a recent poll, seventy-five percent of TV news directors reported using video news releases at least once per day.

Television......what a waste.

The trite reply to this article is -DON'T watch it-. I threw out my TV in 2000; I have a Mac, w/ great DVD capability, I rent stuff that's really great --Ken Burns stuff (jazz..), The Sopranos (isn't organized crime SO MUCH MORE interesting than the disorg

Re:Television......what a waste.

Pssh, you still use a computer? I threw my computer out in 1999 and haven't looked back. I have a library filled with great books, and I can borrow the others from the local library for FREE. The internet is such DREK. Makes kids stupid, and adults stupider. Resist your telecom overlords!!

Cheers,
Someone-holier-than-thou

Re:Television......what a waste.

Yeah, I agree. I haven't used a computer for years!

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Pssh, you still read books? I threw my books out in 1984 and haven't looked back. I have a world of billboards to tell me what to think and I can read them any time I go outside for FREE. The printed word is suck drek. Resist your printing press overlo

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I hate to use bodily fluids to extinguish your catherine wheel but there is a helluva lot of product placement within movies these days anyway - so just by watching DVDs, you're not escaping the corporate brainwashing.

Though I do agree that TV is mostly

Corporate Propaganda Still On the News

One factor that seems to be overlooked is viewer ability to smell a rat and subsequently not be taken in. I feel more people realize the segment is a crafted fake, versus a genuine news spot, than the agencys doing the monitoring assume. I know I've seen these and have been able to tell, and if I can detect the fraud, so can others.

Want something to really worry about in terms of broadcast hyjinks? MTV is using the tried and true subliminal 'power of suggestion' in various spots in their broadcasts in Asia. I happened to be capturing TV via a DVR one evening, and when I played back my sample via the jog wheel, I was able to clearly see a text message inside a faint white rectangular box, overlaid into a short commercial for an upcoming show. It came and went quickly...'progress is now - Fridays on MTV'...not long enough to spot unless you were paying close attention at that moment, but long enough to be captured by the brain for subliminal decoding...ouch. MTVs' idea or broadcast on the behest of some agency, perhaps?

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Want something to really worry about in terms of broadcast hyjinks? MTV is using the tried and true subliminal 'power of suggestion' in various spots in their broadcasts in Asia. I happened to be capturing TV via a DVR one evening, and when I played back m

Propaganda in its own right... FUDD

In the hurricane example, a local news reporter clips out quotes legit a news source from the PR supplied video and wraps her own stuff around it.

This isn't any different then what happens every day in newspapers when reporters lift quotes from company p

They teach it in schools...

When I was in college, I had a part time job as a classroom tech. You see, we had fancy, computerized classrooms that the profs really weren't trained to use. When they ran into issues, I had to help them.

One of the classes I did this for was a sophmore or

Care less

I don't really care if they air these VNRs as long as they have something like a box onscreen at all times throughout it identifying it as an advertisement so I know I should change the channel. And that CERTAINLY needs to be displayed at the beginning, b

Way to go, Captain Obvious!

Work that anti-business /. meme for fun and karma!

Hot on the heels of telling us these things are shown by "News Corp., Tribune, and Disney," Captain Obvious wants us to know that they're paid for by "the country's biggest corporations." Whoa. No kidding,

Sheesh. The Pentagon uses this method all the time

I remember a study from a year back which showed that upwards of 90% of 'news' reports from Iraq all came from Pentagon press releases and contained aboslutely no fact checking or anything resembling actual investigative journalism. "Is your war budget justified?" "Oh, yes! Really, it is! Just look at the news."

-FL