The Daily Show commentator Lewis Black last night skewered the practice of local TV stations using video news releases (VNRs) — prepackaged news-format segments prepared and paid for by those they purport to cover. (Streaming video of this segment currently available.)
Black’s ammunition, which he flashed on the screen for an instant, was a report prepared by a wiki-based news watchdog site called Sourcewatch — an outlet that could be useful for journalists and citizen journalists alike for sussing out spin, backgrounding front groups or tracking flacks
Sourcewatch, begun in 2003 as Disinfopedia, is an outgrowth of the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy, which also produces the quarterly journal PR Watch and hosts the citizen journalism experiment Congresspedia. The Sourcewatch site functions as an open-content guide to, and documentation of, industry-funded groups, PR firms and others who work to shape the public agenda. Sourcewatch says that unlike many wikis it uses a paid editor and requires strict referencing.
A good example of Sourcewatch’s work is its April 2006 report on VNRs, Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed, which documented how a sampling of VNRs for clients ranging from General Moters to Intel were broadcast in dozens and dozens of cases with no disclosure of their source to viewers. For example, Fox 25 KOKH in Oklahoma City, a Sinclair-owned Fox affiliate, aired five of six VNRs in their entirety using the publicist’s original narration.
News professionals should be aware that such practices do get noticed by national watchdogs. Furthermore, resources such as Sourcewatch’s “Fake News” can serve as a call to action for local citizen journalists who want their communities to know which news to trust.
That report makes it easy for citizen journalists to track local examples. For instance, Sourcewatch provides an interactive map showing the locations of 77 TV stations around the U.S. that aired the VNRs. Sourcewatch also provides a page for whistleblowers to reveal such practices at their own stations.
Let’s hope all this begins to act as a disincentive to the VNR regurgitators among us.
