Many of us believe that the news profession strives, above all else, to remain objective, and report the facts about an event or an issue.

I personally believe that most journalists (most journalists I’ve come across, at least) honestly strive for objectivity, accuracy, and clarity. As a former teacher of journalists, I know for a fact that my students took the strict code of ethics to heart, from their days working on the student newspaper, and on through to their internships at major news desks. They carried those ideals into the interview for that first important gig upon graduation.

That first gig sometimes turned out to be a rite of passage that no college could match. My students still strove for objectivity, accuracy and clarity. Problem was, the definition of those three concepts seemed to keep changing, as they tried to honor the goals set by one boss or another. If a story were true, for example, and you could prove it so, then why fret if an opposing side doesn’t have a chance to air its views–especially since the news is no longer beholden to the Fairness Doctrine? What if you offer a contrary view of an issue, but wind up distorting the truth?*

We all realize that the reality of a profession differs somewhat from how we see it portrayed in the college classroom, or in the movies. But sometimes standards become so fluid as to mutate into a lack of standards. And in some cases, we can show that instead of relating the full truth, some news outlets decided to deceive their viewers, in effect perpetrating a hoax upon them. The deception didn’t necessarily (although it very well could) occur in the content of what they said, but rather the context in which they said it.

Over the last ten years, there developed a new method of product public relations, known generally as ‘video news releases (VNRs),’ or ‘branded journalism.’ Such PR firms as MultiVu and D.S. Simon Productions can make professionally produced advertisements that mimic, to the letter, the look and feel of actual news segments. The client can then send them to various television news outlets, along with scripts that the local reporter, or anchorperson can read as a voiceover (just as they would with any other story that the station itself produced). This gives the impression that the story was produced locally.

For TV newscasters, the VNR represents free and easy content. For the client, the VNR serves as not just cheap, but authoritative advertisement. We all know that commercials exaggerate, if not outright lie. But a news segment appears factual and unbiased.

Many stations air this content without disclosing its source, or providing dissenting viewpoints. Thus, the viewer watches assuming that she is receiving an unbiased fact, when it is really a hard sell.

The below clip offers an example of a VNR segment as examined by The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR watch.

Figure 1. VNR for Trend Micro Software, by D.S. Simon Productions



Unlike the hoaxes of Joey Scruggs or Alan Abel, the VNR doesn’t intend to make people question their own points of view, or to engage in social critique. Instead, its job consists of selling a product or agenda as objective truth in an attempt to induce the public into a desired reaction–whether that’s buying anti-viral-software or a policy initiative. But like culture jamming, it subverts mainstream media by aping its language and exploiting its tendencies toward emotionally charged sensationalism.

The federal government began to take advantage of VNRs as early as 2004, when the Bush administration produced a piece championing its changes to Medicare. Finding play on CNN and other news outlets, a woman, introducing herself as Karen Ryan, covered the “story” as though it had no political or partisan agenda. But Ryan was no reporter. In fact, she’s the founder of the Karen Ryan Group, a PR firm in which she often poses as a reporter for VNR segments ranging from public policy to video games.

In fact, the use of VNRs within the US federal government has become tolerated to the extent that various public agencies publish guides on how to do them.

Using PR firms to perpetrate hoaxes in order to engineer public consent for issues and agendas is nothing new. Four years ago, I posted about a bogus story involving Iran. In 2006, Benador Associates planted a story claiming that the Iranian legislature was considering a law forcing all non-Muslims to wear symbols on their clothing. For many, this smacked of the old Nazi policy requiring Jews to wear yellow Stars of David on their chest.

The purpose here, obviously, was to stir up public sentiment against Iran in the West. In this case, the mainstream press caught on quickly enough to nip any long-standing influence the report might have had in the bud.

In the same post, I mentioned another fake news story that the mainstream press did not stop in time. For some, the consequence of that hoax was death.


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*For instance, should a journalist have to consult a Holocaust denier in order to discuss the Holocaust? To do such would make it seem as though this is an actual controversy, as if the truth is somewhere up in the air, or somewhere between the two points of view, when in fact there’s overwhelming evidence–beyond an academic standard of proof–that Nazi atrocities occurred.