Bill Moyers Blasts CPB Chair Tomlinson
Submitted by Laura Miller on
Television journalist Bill Moyers harangued Corporation for Public Broadcasting chair Kenneth Tomlinson at the recent National Media Reform Conference.
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FCC Commissioner Adelstein Issues Fake News Challenge
"We need to fight one of [media consolidation's] most pernicious symptoms, I think, which is the increasing commercialization of media," the Federal Communications Commission's Jonathan Adelstein
Blogging Puts PR in a Spin
Submitted by Bob Burton on
Jay Rosen, who is an Associate Professor at New York University's Journalism Department and author of the PressThink blog, believes the rise of blogging is posing a major challenge to the PR industry.
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U.S. Senate Holds "Fake News" Hearing: PR Industry Imitates Big Tobacco
Anyone who's ever looked at a package of cigarettes in the United States since 1965 is familiar with the Surgeon General's warning labels.
More Government-Grown "News": USDA Pays Writer
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"An Agriculture Department agency paid a freelance writer at least $7,500 to write articles touting federal conservation programs and place them in outdoors magazines," reports the Washington Post.
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Why Armstrong Williams Wants Us To Forgive and Forget
There's an old PR trick that if bad news can't be suppressed, its release should be stalled until late on a Friday afternoon or just before a holiday break. It's a trick that served the U.S. Department of Education well when, late on Friday April 15, it released its Office of Inspector General's damning final report into the $240,000 Armstrong Williams contract to promote the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation.
The strategy behind the late Friday afternoon news dump is simple: most media outlets will be squeezed for space to cover a late-breaking story, looming deadlines will ensure harried journalists don't have time to get much further than the executive summary, and by the time Monday rolls around, it will be seen as stale news by editors with the attention span of a gnat.
Reading the 20-page report, which was prompted by Greg Toppo's exposé on the Williams contract in USA Today, it's easy to see why the Education Department wanted to bury it. The report chronicles the deception, bungling and mismanagement behind the Williams contract.
Fake News as Free Speech
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
PR Week reports on the video news release industry's response to Senator Byrd's one-year measure and the Truth in Broadcasting Act, both of which require disclaimers for pre-packaged "news" segments.
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No Fake News!
On April 6, 2006, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a multi-media report titled, "Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed." It provides the most extensive account to date of how corporate-funded video news releases (VNRs) -- fake TV news -- are routinely aired by newsrooms, without disclosure, as though they were independently-gathered reports.
One Small Step Towards Full Disclosure
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
For one year, U.S. government agencies will be banned "from issuing video news releases that do not clearly identify" the government as the source of the footage. Congressional members "agreed to include the measure in an emergency spending bill," which is why the restriction expires after one year.
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One-Party State Media
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias," reports the New York Times.
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