Defence of VNRs Came from News Directors and “Front Group”
January 11, 2007 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
The Centre for Media and Democracy recently awarded a 2006 Falsie Award to the National Association of Broadcast Communicators. Describing the communicators’ group as a front group created to defend the “systematic deception of news audiences,” the CMD pointed out the complicity between the PR firms creating scripted news segments, and the media companies that run them without disclosing their source.
The CMD criticized attempts by the Radio-Television News Directors Association to “wrap fake news in the First Amendment.” In a survey of 54 uses of video news releases, the CMD found 48 broadcasts failed to disclose of the source of the video content, and most examples of disclosure were ambiguous.
(Image from the Centre for Media and Democracy’s site.)
Nobody’s saying VNRs, and their cousins satellite media tours, are unethical by themselves. It’s the failure to disclose the prepackaged nature of the information that is drawing fire.
In print, the use of quotes from a written news release was long seen as fair game for journalists to use without specifying that the journalist didn’t personally hear the source make the statement. That practice has increasingly shifted to disclosure that the information has been gleaned from a news release.
Most TV viewers assume the footage they watch has been gathered by professional journalists. When a news show presents video shot by an amateur, it’s usually identified as such. So it only makes sense that footage provided by an organization would indicate who provided the footage.
Tags: vnrs, smts, news releases, media relations, ethics, journalism, cmd, fake news
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