Flack Attack

According to the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), CMD is "an organization that is unrelenting in its hostility to the principles of free speech and a free press. . . . And in a linguistic twist that would have earned the admiration of George Orwell himself, this group refers to itself as the Center FOR Media and Democracy."

These words come from an October 2006 RTNDA filing with the Federal Communications Commission, responding to CMD's "Fake TV News" study and a subsequent FCC investigation. But we wonder whether anyone at RTNDA undertook to read Orwell -- or any of the First Amendment cases dealing with the FCC -- before penning those words.

One of the central themes of Orwell's book, 1984, was "doublethink": the propensity of a desensitized public and polity to insist that "black is white" even when they know that this is impossible. RTNDA itself seems to be practicing doublethink when it demands that the FCC end its investigation into fake news, claiming that covert VNR broadcasts are a First Amendment right.

Part of the problem is that RTNDA doesn't seem to know fake news even when it sees it: RTNDA president Barbara Cochran infamously once said that video news releases are "kind of like the Loch Ness Monster. Everyone talks about it, but not many people have actually seen it." In FCC filings, they still don't seem to get it, despite our online video files of VNRs and the "news" segments derived from them, such as an anti-global warming VNR paid for by lobbyists for ExxonMobil.

It is a dark day, indeed, when news media representatives deceive themselves and the public by saying that covertly putting fake news on the public airwaves is a protected First Amendment right. Former FCC general counsel Henry Geller (who served in various capacities under Presidents Johnson and Nixon), recently wrote, "It is shocking that RTNDA has joined the PR industry in condemning the ongoing federal investigation, instead of upholding journalistic standards." We hope you'll find the enclosed excerpts of CMD's new report as shocking as did FCC commissioners and real reporters from across the country. To read the full report, see the videos, and convey your concern to the FCC, go to www.stopfakenews.org.