Thursday, April 06, 2006
Doubly Fake News
From my article at Raw Story, 77 TV stations aired 'fake news reports':
A study by a group that monitors the media reveals that, over a ten month span, 77 television stations from all across the nation aired video news releases without informing their viewers even once that the reports were actually sponsored content, RAW STORY has found.
....News broadcasts based on a General Motors VNR stand out in the report as a striking example of "fake news," not just because they were left largely unchanged when aired on stations in Louisiana and Pennsylvania.
"GM, who introduced the first manufacturer web site in 1996, has recently lowered prices, in some cases by thousands of dollars, on all of their models as a direct result of the customers' ability to comparison shop on the Internet," Medialink's Kate Brookes "reported" in all three broadcasts.
But the Center for Media and Democracy blasts GM's "historical claim" as "fake."
"A simple dated search for "automotive web site" in the Nexis news database revealed a press release from August 1995 in which Volkswagen heralded the launch of their web portal," the report states. "It wasn't until February 1996 that General Motors announced gm.com in their own press release."
More at Raw Story and at The New York Times.
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