News or ads?

Aaron Glantz of IPS reports:

A new study released Thursday by the non-profit Center for Media and Democracy found that at least 77 television stations around the country have aired corporate-sponsored video news releases over the past 10 months. The report accused the stations of actively disguising the content -- which has been produced and paid for by companies like General Motors, Panasonic and Pfizer -- to make it appear to be their own reporting.

"You don't know if you're watching independently gathered news or something that's little better than an advertisement that's just being played on a news program," the Center for Media and Democracy's Diane Farsetta told IPS.

The report says none of the 77 television stations that used material from video news releases told viewers where their footage came from.

"The focus is promoting products sometimes in an incredibly blatant way," she added. "You get Panasonic promoting their electronics, Bisquick promoting their pancake mix. We also found two examples of video news releases promoting new prescription drugs."

Frankly, local TV news is so unbelievably bad that corporate propaganda masquerading as news segments may lead to even better coverage than if the beat reporters were left to their own devices.

That's probably being overly glib, but I'm consistently shocked by how vacuous and irrelevant the coverage is on these broadcasts -- even the alleged straight stories.