News 4 sale

Broadcasters have a special obligation, says Matt Felling, media director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, particularly when it comes to the news. "Consumers are used to watching the news and putting on a filter when the commercial comes on," he says, but undisclosed commercial messages inside the newscast abuse that. "If broadcasters are addressing consumers when that 'filter' is off, it's reducing the newscast to little more than a corporate blog."

Another factor is public dependence on TV news. A recent Harris Poll found that 77 percent of adults rely on local TV news and 71 percent use national or cable news several times a week or daily.

Felling calls VNRs and other commercialization, "the wolf in sheep's clothing of today's media age." And while market forces may help correct the problem, they are also part of the problem, say other observers.

"Some of these stations are really strapped for resources," says Nancy Tamosaitis, president of Vorticom, a PR agency in New York. The VNRs provide material which stations may not be able to get themselves, she adds. And while she's not against labeling the sources, she says it's not always possible. "They're working with these lean teams, and they're just not able to provide the due diligence, even if they would like to."

Other PR professionals maintain that labeling is no longer necessary. "Most people are savvy enough in this day and age that they know they have to investigate a product before they buy," says David Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision, based in Atlanta. Beside that, he says, "People are more suspicious of the media today than they've ever been."

But that cynicism is what makes transparency on the part of the newscasters that much more important, says Diane Farsetta, co-author of the CMD study. The difficulty of detecting a VNR was one of the motivations for conducting the study, she says, adding this cautionary observation: "The perception is that the local news is worse than the national newscasters," she says, "but the practices are present at both the local and the national level, particularly now that many, if not most, of the parent companies of TV stations also own entertainment and film companies."

While it is extremely difficult to know for certain whether you have just watched commercially sponsored messages, one public-relations pro who has been producing VNRs for years says she has developed something of a nose for prepackaged news. "Look for footage that a camera crew wouldn't have had time to go do," says Nancy Tomaitis, pointing to a recent story about a technique for toilet training a cat. Some of the footage involved a cat in a precarious perch. "There was a lot of time and thought involved in getting the cat to do that," she adds.

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