Da O'Dwyer's Public Relations News del 7 aprile 2006: STUDY: NEWSROOMS NOT LABELING VNRs A watchdog group critical of broadcast PR tactics like video news releases said this week that TV news stations are running PR video at an "epidemic" rate without attribution and under the guise of news copy.The Center for Media and Democracy, a Wisconsin non-profit that produces the website PRWatch.org, said it identified 98 instances across 77 TV stations from large and small markets in which VNRs or satellite media tours were aired without disclosure of source to viewers. The watchdog's research spanned 10 months and focused on 36 VNRs from three broadcast PR vendors MultiVu, Medialink, and D S Simon Productions. It unveiled the results in a Washington, D.C., press conference this week with FCC Commission Jonathan Adelstein.CMD, which often calls VNRs "fake news," said its project was geared toward informing the debate in recent years in which Congress, the FCC, journalism professors, reporters and the public have expressed concern about VNRs.Tim Bahr, president of MultiVu, the broadcast PR unit of PR Newswire, likened VNR usage to media's utilization of press releases and said VNRs are properly labeled after production."As they have for decades with printed news releases, media organizations use their own editorial discretion when using broadcast PR content in connection with their reporting," said Bahr. "MultiVu supports them by ensuring that every VNR is delivered with proper attribution. Our own policy is not to distribute anything without including a verified, identified source of the content. We firmly support the media's editorial judgment of how to use that attribution."The New York Times, as it has in the past, sparked the latest flare-up over VNR usage with a story this week ahead of CMD's unveiling of its study.John Stauber, executive director of CMD, said: "Fake TV news is the worst plagiarism scandal in American journalism, and it must be stopped by labeling all VNRs on screen so viewers can tell if its news or fake news."Si va verso la regolazione!
