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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2848 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) Extra! March/April 2006 Fear & Favor 2005 FAIRs Sixth Annual Report Outside (and inside) influence on the news By Julie Hollar and Janine Jackson and Hilary Goldstein In 1896, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs laid out standards by which journalism is still judged today, declaring that his paper would give the news, all the news . . . impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interest involved. Unfortunately, mainstream media often fail to live up to that goal; demands from advertisers, government, media owners and other powerful people frequently manage to blur or breach the wall between the editorial and business ends of the newsroom. In survey after survey, journalists report that they feel outsideor insidepressures to avoid, slant or promote certain stories that might affect those powerful interests. Each year, FAIR compiles a list of some of the most striking examples of such influence; it is by no means comprehensive, but we hope that it sheds some light on those pressures facing journalists and encourages both them and the public to continue to expose threats to independent reporting. In Advertisers We Trust Most people are aware that news media rely on corporate advertising dollarsthough the fact is rarely discussed, and when it is, editors and producers will generally insist that theres no connection between the companies that buy ads and the content of the news. Each year, however, the line between news and advertising blurs further; last year the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner gave notice to its staff that it was about to hire an advertorial editor, to be paid half by the newsroom and half by the advertising department (CJR, 910/05). While most breaches of the editorial wall are less blatant, theyre no less worrying. The essential conflict of commercial news media was on full display when giant advertisers BP, the oil company, and Morgan Stanley, the financial services company, both issued directives demanding that their ads be pulled from any edition of a publication that included potentially objectionable content. BP went so far as to demand advance notice of any stories that mention the company, a competitor of the company or the oil and energy industry in general (AdAge.com, 5/24/05). While these demands may seem like an egregious intervention into the editorial process, the truth is, as one anonymous editor told Advertising Age (5/16/05), theres a fairly lengthy list of companies that have instructions like this. Another magazine executive, also afraid to talk on the record, told AdAge.com (5/24/05) that magazines are not in the financial position today to buck rules from advertisers. An Ad Age reporter (5/16/05) who contacted executives at places like USA Today, Business Week, the New York Times and Fortune found them all unwilling to explain how such advertiser demands were handled. And of course advertisers dont only make clear what sort of news they dont want to be associated with. The October 31 issue of Time magazine featured a section, labeled The Future of Energy, about the need to pursue alternatives to oil and to make oil production more efficient. Throughout the feature were full-page ads for BP, with taglines like investing in our energy future, explaining how the company is pursuing alternatives to oil. BP is also mentioned by a source in Times feature article as one of the more innovative energy companies. That, presumably, was free. U.S. News & World Report featured a similar advertiser-friendly layout in a health column (12/5/05) about Alzheimers disease, which was interspliced with two full-page ads that seemed more than coincidentally related. One ad was for an Alzheimers treatment drug called Aricept the other was for MetLife, the insurance company, touting their foundations contributions to funding research on Alzheimers. (Young Brains, Beware, the magazines headline read, while the MetLife ad declared, Youd be surprised how early the effects of Alzheimers can set in.) Time and U.S. News apparently think going to such lengths to serve corporate sponsors is good business. But its clearly not good business for readers if advertisers are choosing stories on the basis of which will show their products in the best light. At least one outlet is shamelessly selling access to its editorial staff. When the Wisconsin State Journal launched its new Capital Region Business Journal, it announced that advertisers who forked over $25,000 would get not only spots in each issue of the Business Journal and on its website, but a place on the publications advisory panelincluding at least six meetings a year with top editors of the State Journal, which shares staff with the business publication. State Journal publisher Jim Hopson (Madison Capital Times, 3/17/05) said advertisers werent buying access: The sponsors who are sitting on our advisory panel are actually doing us a favor. . . . Im grateful were getting good sound advice to help make certain were covering the topics and issues that are important to the business community. If anyone wants access to the State Journal, they are welcome to call. Whether the State Journal will consider your advice just as good and sound without $25,000 backing it up, though, was not addressed. When it comes to blurring the line between editorial and advertising, morning news shows have long been the vanguard. Now some Gannett-owned stations are simply erasing the line, airing so-called magazine morning programs on which the majority of guests pay to be on the airin other words, infomercials. In Minnesota, Gannetts KARE, an NBC affiliate, announced plans to transform its Today talkshow into Showcase Minnesota, on which some segments will be sold to advertisers at the rate of $2,500 for five minutes. The new show will be shifted from the local programming department to the advertising department. KAREs general manager claims the paid segments will be clearly labeled (Minneapolis Star Tribune, 11/23/05). In Sacramento, the executive producer of the similar show Sacramento & Co. told the Sacramento Bee (8/17/05): Our vision for the show is very clear. This is not a news program. Viewers may not get such a clear vision for these shows, however. Its no secret that advertisers increasingly favor such advertorial type programswith hosts who look like journalists on sets that look like newsroomsprecisely because viewers give them more credence than they do late-night spiels about steak knives. The fact that the Sacramento station, Sacramento News10, wont release the names of the companies that have ponied up to be featured on the show isnt much testament to their transparency. And as for the news value of the paid programming, former Today host Pat Evansa news department employeewas sanguine, calling the new format a vehicle for the community to have a voice. Thats the community that can afford to pay $500 a minute, of course. Even though public television was created precisely to give citizens media free from corporate pressures, its not immune to advertisers demands. Public television plugs for sponsors are often indistinguishable from ads on corporate television stations, but at Connecticut Public Television, currying favor with advertisers has gone a giant step further. When producers for CPTV interviewed doctors at Hartford Hospital for a series on womens health, Connecticut Public Broadcasting president and CEO Jerry Franklin demanded they redo the segment at St. Francis Hospitala major financial sponsor of the seriesinstead. He told the Hartford Courant (8/19/05) that the absence of St. Francis made the segment unbalanced and unfair to the underwriter. And its not an isolated incident; Franklin has been reaching out to nonprofit funders to co-produce CPTV programming for the five years hes been in charge. At least three producers have quit projects at CPTV because of Franklins pressures (Hartford Courant, 8/8/05). PBS prohibits sponsorships when there exists a clear and direct connection between the interests or products or services of a proposed funder and the subject matter of the program. Franklin told the Courant (8/8/05) that those standards only apply to nationally distributed programming, and that his policy is acceptable because he only partners with nonprofit organizations. Credibility with viewers, apparently, doesnt figure into Franklins equation. The Bosss Business Media companies are so entangled with each other nowadays, it can be hard to keep track of who owns what. But sometimes a media outlets editorial stance gives you pretty direct clues to that outlets owners, and their interests. Such was the case with an editorial in the Dallas Morning News (2/6/05) weighing in on the current FCC debate about must carry rules, which require cable companies to continue to carry local channels as they convert to digital technology. The Morning News argued strongly that must-carry rules be maintained; its editorial spoke urgently of local programming as the bulwark of a democratic society, the sort of programming that connects viewers to their community. Nowhere did the paper note, however, that it has another, less high-minded interest in the matter: The Dallas Morning News is owned by Belo Corporation, a media company that owns 19 local television stations and is lobbying the FCC in support of must-carry rules, which would greatly increase its market power. According to the Washington Posts Howard Kurtz (2/14/05), the editorial page editor at the Morning News said she regretted the omission, which she blamed on a busy schedule and staff shortages. Examples of synergy, the cross-promotion of shows from the same corporate owner, are almost too numerous to count on television these days. Morning shows tend to be the worst offenders: ABCs Good Morning America regularly featured interviews and segments devoted to ABCs primetime hit Desperate Housewives last year, while CBSs Early Show welcomed cast members booted from that networks popular reality show Survivor. But the practice is even becoming de rigueur on what have traditionally been considered serious showsas when ABCs John Stossel hosted a broadcast of 20/20 from the set of Desperate Housewives, reporting on reallife versions of topics covered on the show (Variety, 3/18/05), not long after Primetime Live featured (2/3/05) a lengthy interview with the shows star, Teri Hatcher. Last year, when NBCs Dateline was taking heat for devoting hours of airtime to the finales of Friends and other NBC shows, Jeff Fager, the executive producer of CBSs 60 Minutes, vowed he wouldnt be caught doing that: We are not going to do the one-hour special for Everybody Loves Raymonds departure, he said, referring to the hit CBS sitcom. Fager explained that any viewers who tuned in and saw us doing that would leave in a heartbeat. A year later, when Everybody Loves Raymond went off the air, 60 Minutes (5/8/05) marked the occasion by interviewing the series star, Ray Romano. Hypocrisy? No, says Fagerbecause it wasnt a full hour. This gives us some insight into the ethical reasoning of network news executives: Apparently you can turn one-third of your news program into a commercial for your networks shows and still maintain your journalistic integrity. An activist with Ohio Patients Rights got a lesson in media self-interest when he tried to place an announcement in the Cleveland Plain Dealers health calendar for a meeting to discuss the Cleveland City Council permitting hospitals to ban patients for any complaint. Though he had placed meeting announcements before, this one was rejected with no explanation. Suspecting that the rejection was related to hospitals being a big advertiser in the paper, he submitted a new announcement to a different Cleveland paper, the weekly Sun Newsowned, like the Plain Dealer, by Advance Publicationsthis time about a meeting to discuss the Plain Dealers censorship of his first meeting announcement. He received an accidental reply from Sun News staffer Carol Kovach, who apparently meant to send the message to her executive editor, Linda Kinsey: Linda: Did you get this? He wants us to publish this. I think its in poor taste for us to publish the stuff about the PD. A straight meeting notice, OK, but do we really need to bash the PD? Let me know what you think. Needless to say, the announcement never ran. Though FAIR aims to promote journalistic ethics by shining a light on breaches, an item from a past report prompted one paper to commit another breach. The Kingston, N.Y. Sunday Freeman published (4/17/05) a syndicated column by Norman Solomon that recounted some of the examples given in FAIRs Fear & Favor 2004 report (34/05)but with one change. The paper added the following editors note after an item criticizing the New Haven Registers extensive and fawning coverage of a new Ikea store: Register officials say the news coverage and editorial were warranted because of the positive economic impact Ikea would bring to the New Haven area. The Register says it knew prior to the opening that Ikea would be an infrequent advertiser. What the note failed to mention was that the Register is the flagship publication of the Journal Register Company, the same company that owns the Freeman. And in case the source of that editorial decision is in any doubt, the journalist who brought the incident to FAIRs attention noted that everyone in the editorial staff at the Freeman is incensed about this breach of ethics (in a journalism ethics column, of all places!). Powerful Players & PR A common complaint about media is that all they care about is money. But theres money, and then theres money. The group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had moneythey were prepared to pay $5,000 to run an ad in Billboard magazineand Billboard was happy to take that money. But then, sometime between when Billboard agreed to run the ad and the day it was slated to run, the ad was cancelled. According to the New York Daily News (3/29/05), PETAs ad was a direct criticism of Jennifer Lopez, whose new clothing line prominently features real fur. Could it be that the magazine found PETAs money less compelling than the influence of Sony Corporations Epic Records, which just released Lopezs new album, and that of Lopezs powerful publicist, Nanci Ryder? The Daily News couldnt get Billboard to return calls for an explanation of the decision, but Ryder wasnt shy about declaring victory. Im doing my job, which is protecting my client, she told the News. If theyre not selling interviews to advertisers outright (see In Advertisers We Trust, above), morning news shows are still generally chockablock with soft segments on entertainment, travel and consumer products that dont eschew brand names. Indeed, the only thing distinguishing such popular features from infomercials is that the experts discussing the products dont seem to be paid by the manufacturersseem, unfortunately, sometimes being the operative word. Take James Oppenheim, technology editor at Child magazine. In November 2004 Oppenheim appeared on a local Austin, Texas news program talking up various toys, including Kodaks new electronic photo album for kids. He also pushed the product in a similar appearance on NBCs Today show (12/21/04). What viewers of neither segment knew was that Oppenheim was paid by Kodak to promote the thing, along with virtually every other product he mentioned (Wall Street Journal, 4/19/05). The Austin station says they didnt know about the deal, while NBC says theyre looking into it. But these kinds of financial relationships are really open secrets. The Wall Street Journal illustrated how the system works: The companies it talked to said that disclosure is the responsibility of TV stations, while TV stations claim to be simply shocked when they learn of such relationships, no matter how many times they learn of them. Since national news shows at least pretend to have standards about such things, companies often dont pay the so-called experts for those spots directly. They just pay the person for appearances on lots and lots of local shows, and then, if they happen to mention the product when theyre on, say, Good Morning Americathats just icing. Of course, a journalist should disclose whenever sources have been paid by the companies theyre talking aboutnot just when theyre being paid at the moment that theyre speaking to the journalistbut everyone knows why they dont. A spokesperson for Wal-Mart, which pays a woman to promote their jewelry on TV, spelled it out in the Journal: If the payments were disclosed, that would make their paid experts appearances look too much like infomercials. Its not just morning shows that venture into that gray zone between news and infomercial, though; newspaper journalists can likewise succumb to the temptation of an easy story provided by PR people. In March 2005, headlines across the country announced a dramatic new study by the National Sleep Foundation showing that half the adult population of the U.S. had trouble falling asleep. But as the Sacramento Bees Dorsey Griffith and Steve Wiegand (6/26/05) pointed out after some digging, the reports largely failed to note a key bit of information: The study and its publicity campaign were funded by pharmaceutical companies that make sleeping pills. Whats more, the Bee reported that the National Sleep Foundation, though ostensibly an independent nonprofit health advocacy group, gets most of its money from sleeping pill manufacturers, and 10 of its 23 board members have current or past financial ties to the industry. But reporters didnt have to do this kind of sleuthing to realize that there was a connection between the study and the sleeping pill industry; the fact that the press kit announcing the study also included a pitch for a new sleeping pill, Lunesta, should have been a giveaway. However, the Bee looked at 84 mainstream news reports on the study and found that only 17 mentioned the drug industrys sponsorship of the study and the foundation. Those kinds of journalistic gaps, particularly in health reporting, are something worth losing sleep over. Government Pressures Media got off to an inauspicious start in 2005 with the revelation that the Bush administration paid journalist Armstrong Williams to plug the No Child Left Behind Act (USA Today, 1/7/05). The emergence of similar stories throughout the year showed that the Williams case was hardly an isolated incident of journalistic conflicts between allegiance to the public and to the government (or a government paycheck). In Florida, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune (3/26/05) revealed that Gov. Jeb Bushs office used taxpayer dollars to hire the services of Mike Vasilinda, a well-known freelance television reporter in Tallahassee, who also runs his own video production company. The state paid Vasilindas firm more than $100,000 over four years to produce news spots promoting Bushs policies, as well as those of other Florida government agencies, including the Department of Education and Secretary of State. Meanwhile, Vasilinda was covering those same agencies in his television wire service reports, which aired on CNN and local NBC affiliates. While some stations, when informed of Vasilindas dual role, said theyd stop running his reports, others had no qualms, like news director Forrest Carr at Tampas WFLA: [Vasilinda] assures me he has safeguards in place. He would not allow himself to be in a position where he would allow his journalism to be compromised. Presumably, though, Carr wont be attaching notices to Vasilindas reports to let viewers decide for themselves if they place the same amount of trust in the PR agentcumjournalist. The Boston Globe (4/8/05) uncovered a similar relationship between Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romneys administration and Boston Herald columnist Charles D. Chieppo. In his March 21 column, Chieppo extolled Romneys mass transit plan, which was drawn up by the head of the states Environmental Affairs office. What he didnt tell readers was that only three days earlier hed submitted a bid for a $10,000 contract to help promote that offices policiesa contract he won soon after his laudatory column ran. Whats perhaps even more disturbing is that the Herald didnt see a problem with Chieppos deal with the state; editorial page editor Rachelle Cohen decided to keep him on provided he didnt write about topics hes consulting on. It wasnt until the Globe exposé ran that the paper dropped Chieppo, citing his failure to disclose another contract with a state authority to promote the states tourism industry (Boston Globe, 4/9/05). On November 2, the Washington Post carried a potentially explosive front-page story about black sites, secret prisons established by the CIA after the September 11 attacks to interrogate terrorism suspects. The Post reported that while virtually nothing was known about these sites, concerns about them were increasing in the wake of revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But one crucial thing that the Post did know about the sitestheir locationsit withheld from the public, at the request of government officials. The Post explained that senior officials argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation. Of course, keeping the locations secret also offers the government a way to keep their activities out of the public eye. The Post article noted that government officials acknowledged that revealing information about the sites would open the U.S. to legal challenges and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad. In other words, its just the kind of story that a watchdog press should be digging into. Other outlets showed less deference to the U.S. government; reports detailing likely locations emerged in the Financial Times (11/3/05) and elsewhere. To date, though, the Washington Post has kept its pact with the White House. The Bush administration and its supporters complain regularly about the dearth of positive news stories in Iraq. But a Washington Post column by Al Kamen (4/8/05) indicates that at least some journalists are censoring the bad news, not the good news. According to Kamen, an internal army report explained that U.S. forces took an embedded reporter to a school near Mosul to cover the handing out of school supplies to needy students. But when they arrived at the site, the report said, they found not schoolchildren, but an Iraqi family homesteading in the building. The report continued: Fortunately, the reporter elected not to cover the event, which could have made us look bad, since we didnt know what was going on with the school after we funded its construction. . . . [The journalist] understood what had happened and had other good coverage to use . . . rather than airing any of this event. With journalists, from embedded reporters all the way up to Washington Post editors, electing not to provide the American public with news that exposes governments failures and wrongdoings, official censorship is apparently no longer even necessary. Please also see the sidebars to this article: Prepackaged News: Straight >From the Source, No Journalism Required (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2851) and Strictly Personal (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2852). _____________________________ Note: This message comes from the peace-justice-news e-mail mailing list of articles and commentaries about peace and social justice issues, activism, etc. If you do not regularly receive mailings from this list or have received this message as a forward from someone else and would like to be added to the list, send a blank e-mail with the subject "subscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or you can visit: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news Go to that same web address to view the list's archives or to unsubscribe. E-mail accounts that become full, inactive or out of order for more than a few days will become disabled or deleted from this list. FAIR USE NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. 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