Fake News on Local Television

Farhad Manjoo is promoting a new book: "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." Aside from being a witty and intriguing title, the topic of how companies and special interests feed stories that news outlets use verbatim is an important tone.

It's not that being a channel for commercial interests is usual. Many people who have written press releases have the experience of seeing them turned directly into stories without a single change in wording. But corporations are becoming ever more clever in this undertaking:

Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she'd once written a magazine column called "Internet Mom"). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.
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Nine stations aired Raskin's warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.

But Raskin went on further, suggesting "safe" products as gifts - from companies that hired her as a shill. This is also done on a national level. When you see someone touting round-ups of products, often - although not always - that person is paid by the manufacturers to include their products.

But the use of spoon-fed news feeds, whether print, audio, or video, has become a real problem. News outlets use them because it's "free" content, and the audience never knows that it's just been sold down the river.