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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"
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]
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."
The Onion is satire and makes itself known as such. As does SNL Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. This is not the same as purposefully misrepresenting news in order to present slanted opinion. That broadcast news organizations have been caught actually peddling this stuff from government and private industry sources shows just how far television news ethics has declined. It's bad. I can both argue for Fox News as a legitimate news organization simply because they're just as bad as CBS as a factual source. IOW: TV news really really sucks.
Read a real newspaper if you want to be informed. Actually, read several.
This isn't an issue about infomercials with the disclaimers you mention, nor is it about humorists. Those obviously wouldn't warrant an investigation. The issue is about "news reports" that are created by government and/or corporate organizations which are sent to "real" news producers, who then put them on the air without disclosing their source. It's a way for those producers to fill time in their broadcasts without spending any money and the creators of the segments get to spread their message to the public through a medium which that audience [probably foolishly] trusts. I posted this link in a message down a bit further, but it probably bears repeating.
You're 100% correct. The problem lies with the idiots who can't differentiate between opinion shows and news shows.
While the left is guilty of this when basing their opinion on flaks like Orilley, the right is equally guilty of it when they consider Daily Show etc to be news.
Which goes to show, not all idiots belong to one party or the other. Idiocy is rampant on both sides.
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?
Riiiight. That's why today, during a live "breaking news" segment about a diverted commercial airliner, a man appeared on camera at Fox News and said "She's probably not an al Qaeda affiliate, probably not a terrorist, could just be a Ned Lamont supporter, we don't know."
"The Onion is satire and makes itself known as such."
/ a/2002/06/08/MN129538.DTL
Apparently not entirely
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
Yeah, well. What did you expect? A few weeks ago the Fox correspondent in Lebanon said it was "widely believed" that Hezbollah officials were hiding in the Iranian embassy. When a correspondent on Fox says "widely believed", he means widely believed amongst Fox cameramen.
Of course, it turned out that no such person was hiding in Iran's embassy. As far as I know, no reputable news outlet ran with this story. Therefore, searching on "hezbollah iranian embassy" on Google gives you a pretty complete list of right wing warmongering disinformation sites which should not be taken seriously. The first outlet to report the truth -- that "Hezbollah leader not in Iran's embassy" -- is the People's Daily News of China.
How sad is it when a major news provider in the USA is peddling disinformation while the Chinese communist party's official news organ is reporting the straight scoop?
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.