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Fake News Stories Probed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the truthiness dept.

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.""

9 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Agitprop by (1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1) · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From FTA:
    "You can't tell anymore the difference between what's propaganda and what's news," Adelstein said.
    “Soviet Russia” jokes aside (who, by the way, had an entire Department for Agitation and Propaganda), we are at that uncanny nexus where Capitalism and Bolshevism meet: where greed, unchecked, vies to overawe and enslave a receptive populace.

    Prescription? Strap in; when the government fears the governed, voting won't get you anywhere.

    1. Re:Agitprop by CrazyDuke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is a bit off the mark. But, personally, I thought one of the major points of 1984 was that it didn't really matter if the government was fascist, communist, or theocratic, the end result was essentially the same. So, the simularities between authoritarian governments aren't really a surprise me.

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
    2. Re:Agitprop by 246o1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The fact that all the things politicians try to get away with shoving down our throats are exposed so quickly has not prevented them from trying. Now, however, the people who learn about all this stuff immediately on the internet, an ever-growing but still-small (way less than half the population) group are well-informed.

      There's a huge gap between people who try to find out what's true and people who just accept whatever they want to be true. The more lies there are out there, and the more people realize there are lies, the more people will just decide to believe in whatever reality they like. For instance, no matter how much I point out the relentless corruption of the government in office now, my father has settled on the idea that Republicans and Democrats are basically equally corrupt, which means he won't vote on corruption as an issue anymore. He just has no faith in the reliability of any news source that he or I might find, and he is busy with his life, so he doesn't bother finding out what is true.

      When we allow a variety of false "truths" (Kerry's more of a flip-flopper than Bush, Gore claims to have invented the internet, there are WMD in Iraq, there's a connection between Iraq and 9-11, etc.) to stick around on TV long after they are show to be false, we decrease the believability of any TV news.

      There is meaningful damage done to our society everytime the bar for truth and honesty in news reporting is lowered further.

      Yes, the internet has been great for getting news out to some people, but for most people, it's still just as hard to tell whether to trust little green footballs or rawstory as it is to decide between Fox and (if there were a liberal network I would put it here)

      --
      Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
  2. 'fake news' indeed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  3. plenty of fake news for everybody (paid by you) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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]

  4. Re:Baaaa..... by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are misunderstanding what's being probed here. These are essentially commercials that are taking place DURING the newscast. Anchor A will say "And now over to Correspondent B in City C for a report on Topic X that you'll find truly startling!" The camera will switch over to the "correspondent" who will then proceed to give their spiel, which is really just a purchased promo spot for some product or research study. The screen will still have the Channel XX logo in the corner with the correspondents name in the same news font as the rest of the newscast. This is because this is actually part of the newscast. That is what's being investigated. Not a full page ad in the newspaper (which, by the way, says "paid advertisement" in small type at the top of the page).

    --
    This guy's the limit!
  5. On the TV end... by 7Prime · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  6. The FCC is a whore who fucks the public by sowth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. :-)"

  7. Zen and the Art of Wikipedia Vandalism by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.