A friend who works in media had some interesting information about ways that corporations get their messages presented in a news format. Yes, this is prime, DL type shit:
There are 2 levels of deceipt involved in this lucrative business. First: The companies make slick "news style" pieces that the news shows run as though it was news. This is partly due to the fact that many of these local news stations do not have the budget, equipment, or trained personnel to make a slick piece - so they are happy to have something to spice up their show - or just look professional. These video companies hire former news employees and pay them twice as much, so the pieces look and sound like the something you would see on the network news-they are very well crafted.
But then here's the really interesting part. These corporations want to know how often their pieces are actually making air, so they encode the footage and hire Nielson who does the ratings for the networks to track how often the footage shows up on any News broadcast. Then another company puts together a reel of all the times the pieces aired and gives it to the corporation. Now even though the news companies often air these pieces in their entirety the one thing they often don't do is name the company who is providing the spokesperson. But that is the what these companies really crave more than anything - they go through the whole process so that their company will receive name recognition and validity from being in a news environment. So the video company who made the piece originally then puts the name of the company into the piece in the same style as the rest of the news show, and gives it back to the corporation as though that was how it aired on National TV. Basically the person that you hire to fool the public is also fooling you.
The other thing that makes it even more complicated is that often these pieces are really helpful, informative pieces. They might be about various ways to protect yourself and your home from fire, or how to lower the chances of an elderly person having an automobile accident. The news stations don't make these pieces because they are too busy making pieces about the latest double homicide or the color of the terror alert. So in some ways these are helpful, informative pieces which because of the media bias toward sensationalism would not ordinarily be produced. This wouldn't be the case if the media had not abdicated their role as a source of information in our society. But since the media to a certain extent has given up that role, there is a way in which these companies are filling a void. Keep in mind however that they are always filling this void from their own point of view, and there are subtle ways this comes out. For example a Pfizer spokesperson talking about medication problems will not say,
"Perhaps the medication should be discontinued." He will say,"Perhaps this medication should be switched to a different medication."
Posted by bluprnt at July 23, 2004 08:39 PM