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Fake News Stories Probed
An anonymous reader writes "From the article: "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has begun an investigation of the use of video news releases, sometimes called "fake news," at U.S. television stations.
Video news releases are packaged stories paid for by businesses or interest groups. They use actors to portray reporters and use the same format as television news stories.""
Prescription? Strap in; when the government fears the governed, voting won't get you anywhere.
I wonder if this wasn't supposed to be an edict to come down on the Daily Show & Colbert Report and someone misinterpreted the memo instead...
Corporations have long been treating consumers like sheep. It's a small wonder that they haven't started publishing fake newspapers yet.
It isn't just corporate and interest groups that are doing this. What concerns me much much more is that the Bush administration is doing this, too, to advance their agenda. And it's paid for by US taxpayers.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Perhaps they should start at the executive branch of the good 'ol USA. The Bush administration was doing just this to push their Medicare Reform bill a couple years back. They got quite the bad press when it became public. One wonders, have they stopped? Well, certainly *someone* hasn't...
I seem to remember there's a word for this. Uhhh propagation? Proposition? Proletariat? No....
hmmm...
Ah, yes. propaganda!
Fake news == Faux news == Fox news
Nuff said.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Fox News is a legitimate news organization. This becomes apparent upon reading their print material or watching their actual news reports. Like all the other cable news outlets, if you're watching the interview shows like O'Rielly you're not getting hard news - it's all opinion. But watch the news and -- while it's most definitely slanted toward the administration and Republicans -- it's also factually accurate news. *shrug* Like all TV news it's watered down and of little factual value. If you really want hard news, you must read it.
Bush White House Used Taxpayer Dollars To Create Fake News Programs To Promote No Child Left Behind; Also Rated News Stories Based On Favorability
Ketchum Produced Fake News Reports to Promote No Child Left Behind. The Department of Education contracted with Ketchum public relations to produce and distribute "news" stories featuring a fake reporter announcing the availability of tutoring under No Child Left Behind. According to the Associated Press, the Administration paid $700,000 to Ketchum for the segment. The video includes a story featuring Education Secretary Rod Paige and ends with the "journalist" saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting." [AP, 10/10/04, Washington Post, 10/15/04; People for the American Way Release, 10/11/04]
Department of Education Also Paid Ketchum to Code Media Stories Based on Favorability of Coverage. According to the Associated Press, the Department of Education used taxpayer dollars to devise a rating system to score news coverage of the federal No Child Left Behind law. The system rewards points to news outlets that air reports that, among other things, say that President Bush and Republicans are strong on education. The news rankings also rank individual reporters on how sympathetic they are to the Administration's program. [AP, 10/10/04]
Bush Administration Paid Armstrong Williams $240,000 To Promote No Child Left Behind
Armstrong Williams Paid By Bush Administration To Tout NCLB. USA Today revealed that the Department of Education paid political commentator/talk radio host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) initiative on his program and to other African American commentators. During these efforts, Williams failed to disclose his contract with the government. [USA Today, 1/7/05]
Taxpayer Dollars Also Used To Create Fake News Programs For Bush Medicare Plan
Bush Used Taxpayer Dollars to Stage Fake News Stories To Promote His Medicare Bill. Bush's Health and Human Services Department also contracted with Ketchum to promote the president's Medicare drug benefit. Using the same public relations consultant, Karen Ryan, Ketchum produced a series of video news releases that included scripted interviews and pictures of Bush receiving a standing ovation as he signed the legislation. During the first two months of 2004, the pieces aired 53 times on 40 stations in 33 major media markets. [New York Times, 3/15/04; Atlanta Journal Constitution, 3/15/04; LA Times, 3/16/04; Lexington Herald Leader, 5/19/04]
* GAO Found Bush Administration Guilty. On May 19, 2004, the General Accountability Office (GAO) released its investigation findings into fake news segments produced by Medicare to promote the Bush Medicare bill. The segments, video news releases, were distributed to local television sessions to be run as part of the station's news programs. The segments contained no identifiers that they were produced by the government, which the GAO found violates the propaganda prohibitions of the Consolidated Appropriations Resolution of 2003. The GAO concluded, "Because [Medicare] did not identify itself as a source of the news report, the story packages, including the lead-in script, violate the publicity or propaganda prohibition." [GAO, Decision in Matter of Center for Medicaid & Medicare Services - Video News Release, 5/19/04]
Anyway, I have seen just about every one of the "fake news" infomercials. Being a nightowl helps. Anyway, should be obvious to anyone that these are fake. The begining and the end of the infomercials have disclaimers that affirm their paid commericial status. I think that they should have disclaimers on the bottom of the screen that remind channel surfers of this fact, but overall they are not well hidden.
Hey Mods, guess what? By modding this comment up and making three easy payments of $19.99, you will have expended less than $60! Mod now! Apply directly to forehead! Apply directly to forehead! Apply directly to forehead!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Here's an article from the Center for Media and Democracy that gives a lot more information about this practice and also provides video examples for your viewing "pleasure."
In the article, one of the reasons cited for running this crap is that it is free. Given what a station charges for air time, they could run this stuff every hour and still make a profit. Meanwhile, they want to up the fines for obscenity to millions of dollars.
So you want to see the real priorities of the current administration? Run their political propaganda (or the propaganda of their corporage supporters) and recieve a slap on the wrist. Say something that offends the radical religious right wing and get put out of business.
I, for one, do NOT welcome the rule of our new theocratic overlords.
I'd like to see them getting at it right at the source. After all, wasn't it the infamous Bush administration who started fabricating stories during the Iraqi war? And no, I'm not even targetting the missing WMD's, simply focussing on already proven lies. Like the female soldier who was alledgidly a POW and being tortured in an hospital. Turned out that her injurier were well treated but the campaign needed more goodwill so what better way than to introduce the "damsel in distress".
Or what about the treachery at the Abu Graib prison, events which weren't merely denied but also covered with newsstories than absolutely nothing was going on down there. Or what about the US' private detention centre on Cuba were we only hear news about those dangerous and evil terrorists doing all sorts of naughty things when in fact they're only getting lawyers into gear in order to demand to be treated under international civilion rights which every human should be entitled to.
So... Please go right ahead with the investigation but if you guys don't start right at the top I can't help wonder if this whole deal is in fact fake in itself.
Check out the 1995 documentary 'Spin' to see some early examples of this type of fake news being broadcast during the run-up to the 1992 election.
On fake government. An investigation into what the hell Congress has been doing the last 10 years. We used to have news outlet that reported on this kind of thing. My best news source now is the Daily Show for National News. For local state news I still read the paper which is probably why I went to dinner recently and was the only one who new that they were planning to build huge privately owned toll roads in our state and that there were plans to build 16 coal fired power plants.
I mean these weren't illiterate people, but they had decided that the local paper was liberal trype, so they quit reading it. I wish it was their land that they were going to take through eminant domain.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
Remember the story of Fox producing a faked story about rBGH where whistlblowers sued them and the courts decided not that Fox hadn't lied, but that it was legal for them to do so? The FCC should have stood up then. If they are going to stand up now, they will have to apply the rules to Fox as well..right?
To use the true terms, there is white propaganda, which is the average person stating something in their own words. They are trying to be objective, they have no ulterior motives, they simply state things in the manner which their brain happened to percieve it. There is Gray Propaganda, which knowingly leads you to one side, but at least makes an attempt to be truthful in the information they provide (i.e. they leave things out, but don't blatantly decieve). black propaganda is something which intentionally decieves.
I believe that the bush administration in particular is guilty of a larger than normal amount of black propaganda. I think corporations, especially in the U.S. typically engage in a good amount of grey propaganda, in fact, advertising itself is generally grey. But all it takes is one individual within the organization to push grey into black. In other words, doing these kinds of things isn't inherently wrong, but it is definitely treading a thin line between doing something self-promoting, and something very wrong.
"The GPL is viral by design, like any good religion."
How should the US government communicate information to news organizations then? News releases, whether on paper, in audio, or in video, are the preferred means of distribution for all news-disseminating bodies. When a supposed news-gathering organization merely parrots what they've heard in a news release without any further investigation or insight, it is the news-gathering organization that deserves to be chastized for deceiving people.
(Yes, the government does more than just VNRs; I don't defend the use of pundits being paid to stump for the gov't on TV shows, for example. I speak solely of VNRs in the paragraph above.)
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The only way to know that you are watching an infomercial, without consulting the online TV gude, is to wait until the end of the infomercial. At its conclusion, the television station will announce that "The previous broadcast is paid programming."
The obvious way to help the innocent TV viewer is to simply require all infomercials to prominently display the same distinguishing marker on the lower left of the TV screen. Given the content of some of these infomercials, I propose displaying an icon resembling Bozo the Clown.
What I hate are the "news" stories that promote the airing network's other programming. For example, the local Fox affiliate "reports" ad nauseam about the latest American Idol happenings while that show is running. There are usually pieces about what Jack Bauer is up to during 24's season as well. These aren't presented as if they're just providing programming information (e.g., "Coming up next on Fox...") but rather as legitimate news. I often suspect that other fluff pieces are also supporting the commercial interests of the network's parent company or subsidiaries. For example a story about a new theme park opening, or an artist who has released a new album, or a movie premiere. So much media and entertainment is owned by big business that it doesn't require much imagination to believe that such stories are crafted to be a subtler form of advertising.
Every single time I have ever had direct access to the truth of a news story I have found the reporting to be shoddy - ranging from quotes in a newspaper attributed to me from a company I quit two years earlier and claims that the company I work for is Australian (it was based in the US with no Australian office) or an entire article about my employer's partnership with a competitor (with zero basis in reality), to claims that a recent weightwatcher of the month (a friend of mine) used to eat many hamburgers a day (a complete fabrication). I regularly see my own employers making fabricated press releases that are reported as news with zero attempt at verification by reporters. Whatever level, whether it's business reporting or feel good local news, reporting is a web of lies. God knows how much truth there is in reporting from places like Iraq when they can't tell the truth about their own backyard.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e__3STe4jwU
I only mod funny =D
"Yes, it is correct that some people say that I don't tell the truth on this show."
I'm a television producer, mostly of commercial spots, but I've always been a very strong advocate of keeping news and advertising away from eachother. Unfortunately, the industry doesn't tend to agree. Promotions and other advertising schemes have been spilling into news in greater and greater quantities. This is especially true for soft news, or morning news, which is virtually a marketting team's playground. The Today Show did this whole "Wedding Giveaway" promotion, where they chose a couple to help fund their wedding, in exchange for them using certain advertisers, and following them through their wedding preparations. So my local station decides to do the same thing, on a local level. I must say, as a whole, it turned out quite well, but it made me feel icky having to make news packages that had contracts sitting behind them. I raised a lot of complaints to the general manager, the sales manager, and the news director about this, and none of them actually wanted to do it, but had basically convinced themselves that they had to do it for the company to stay alive.
In another incident, one of our clients weasled her way into using some of our news footage for her commercial, and she pushed the general manager (who does some production) more and more, until he actually ended up using video of one of our anchors doing a tag, which goes against some of our basic principals. When the anchor found out about this, she was furious, and forced them to retract the ad. I went down to my boss and basically asked him, "What the hell were you thinking?" And the response was basically that he knew it was wrong at the time, but he couldn't figure out what to do, and added that the station was going to be pushing the envilope more and more just to keep afloat. I don't buy it for a second. I don't know what the hawks up at ClearChannel corporate have been feeding everyone, but there are other methods of advertising that work just as well. To appease the client (and at the same time, give her a big, "fuck you"), I setup one of our side rooms as a news studio, with a totally different backdrop, and one of our sales team as an anchor... and made it OBVIOUSLY fake. I did everything possible to keep it from looking anything like our news: I went as far as coming up with my own news color scheme, with lower thirds and over-the-shoulders to match... anything to keep this fucking ad away from looking like our news. Since this is a small town, and everyone knows the anchors, it would be immediately obvious that this was fake. Our client was furious. "What happened to the lower thirds? Why isn't it in the newsroom? What happened to the over-the-shoulders?". She didn't want to come out and say it, but she was wanting our news image to help sell her service.
I'm not as concerned with actors posing as reporters, what I'm more concerned with, at this point, are reporters that are forced into the position of advertising as part of their news.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
You are suprised it took this long for the FCC to go after them? I'm not. The FCC is a whore to the highest bidder.
They sold most of the radio spectrum out from under the public. Why do you think you have to pay such outrageous prices for cellphone service? Those are public airwaves you are using--they should be free. Cellphones should cost about as much as a landline to use.
Then there is WiFi. Do you know what part of the spectrum it is on? The same one which microwave ovens interfere. We should have multigigabit wireless networking with a range of kilometers. Where you could essentialy have acess to a citywide LAN just by plugging a networking card into your computer.
I'm suprized the FCC went after them at all. Tomorrow I expect to see someone from the FCC Reading from a corporate letterhead and holding a briefcase with money falling out of it, saying: "We apologize to our corporate spons..I mean friendly companies. Our accusations were unfounded and a mistake. Have a doubleplusgood day. :-)"
There is an art to Wikipedia abuse. If someone cites a Wikipedia article in some argument they're making, you can always just go to Wikipedia and edit the page so that they're wrong. But that's what a novice Wikipedia vandal does.
A pro knows to edit the article in a very subtle way, so that it looks like the person has poor reading comprehension. Let's say the person cites a Wikipedia article with a sentence like this, in order to support the argument that Colbert is a Democrat.
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Democrat.[12][13]
A novice might change it to this (correctly preserving footnote superscripts, which thankfully do not need to be relocated here from elsewhere in the article):
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Republican.[12][13]
It makes the person appear to be wrong- and the vandalism is obvious. That's like swapping Eurasia for Eastasia. There's no way he could have misread that.
But change it to this
Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert has even been described as a Democrat.[12][13]
and the person looks not only wrong, but plausibly wrong because it looks like he can't read. That's what makes successful Wikipedia vandalism an art.
One of the lesser known forms of journalitic bias is the use of press releases. A press release is an organisations take on an event. They spin facts to make the organization look great. Thats why PR departments always issue them...because they know they will always be printed verbatim in the newspaper. Usually with attribution though.
0 6.pdf . Also check out http://www.washingtonwatchdog.org/documents/cfr/ti tle47/part73.html and scroll down to section 1212 to read the actual regulation.
Editors love press releases from the newswires and from the government. It frees up reporters to report on other stories, provides coverage in areas where you don't have reporters, and they come at a very low cost. Journalists love them because it makes writing a story a cinch! You change a few words here and there, add your own interview, and tada, in 15 minutes you have a local story from a national newswire story. You can see this in action if you read the headlines in more than one paper...all the stories are similar, because they are getting their news from the same sources! Think of press releases like using modules and libraries while coding.
Corporate PR has gotten smart and started to make video press releases. Nothing wrong with this per se. But television news editors have gotten sloppy and forgot to attribute their sources. This is a huge no-no. Federal regulations require the disclosure as a condition of the license. When a broadcast covers a matter involving the discussion of a controversial issue of public importance furnished by any other entity, the broadcaster must make disclose this, and keep a list of the entity's governance on file for public inspection. Check out http://www.prwatch.org/node/4826 and the complaint made to the FCC at http://www.freepress.net/docs/fcc_complaint_4-06-
Requiring a notification is not censorship and is not unconstitutional in my book. It is similar to the "This Campaign Ad was Paid for by Bill Clinton" requirements for TV ads. Broadcasting on the radio and on the TV is not a right. You need a license from the government. So, you have to follow the rules you promised to follow. If you break those rules, your going to be fined.