Media Literate News Producers

The melding of marketing with newscasts is nothing new. As producers face shrinking budgets and limited resources, promoting commercial interests as legitimately newsworthy becomes increasingly common. The use of video news releases (VNR) and content provided by companies, and other third parties, grows. Often, producers include commercial content innocently, though they are typically naïve or negligent. Product placement has even made its way onto news sets, recently and probably not so innocently. As with most ethical issues in journalism, those who see the problem as black and white really miss the many shades of gray that are the present reality.

There’s a new television news operation in San Diego that started up one week ago. Evident to any critical viewer is the reliance on content provided by third parties. They’ve done stories on Smart Cars, various movies, and the 40^th anniversary of McDonalds, complete with stacks of Big Macs and a live shot with Ronald McDonald. My purpose is not to single out this news department but to illustrate the pressures producers face. More importantly, we need to understand what is happening and level with viewers about how these stories wind up on the news, in other words--full disclosure; we should encourage media literacy in our audience and be media literate producers ourselves.

In the interest of my own full disclosure, I spent five years developing and helping manage a video news service for The Cleveland Clinic (CC). CC is among the finest academic medical centers in the world. In addition to patient care, education is integral to CC’s mission. The produced stories and video elements that CC provided to stations could be used in a number of different ways, from turnkey turnaround of tracked packages to pulling elements for inclusion in what the station was putting together itself. As a longtime advocate for ethical journalism, my position was clear. Identify what we send; then make certain that final editorial control is with the journalists, not CC. And encourage stations that use our material to localize by talking to doctors, researchers, and clinicians, independent of CC. Within The Clinic, our unit was clearly separated from marketing; the physician CEO, who was there when we started, made it clear that our role was more in line with education than advertising or promotion.

The problem with what’s happening now is that the commercial marketing content that winds up in newscasts is often neither identified nor acknowledged as such. My wife observed that there is a generation of media consumers who don’t clearly distinguish between marketing content and news. In essence, she was saying that segments of today’s audience are media illiterate. But the problem goes deeper. Many producers are not media literate, at least not in any sophisticated fashion. Ultimately, this is a leadership issue. The imperative to set standards and explain expectations falls on newsroom managers and on the culture of the organization. In the expanding world of online journalism the need for media literate writers, producers, and editors is especially critical. The amount of content available, through aggregations sites such as thenewsmarket.com, and content delivered directly to stations by third parties, can serve as valuable resources for news organizations. The challenge is to use it responsibly, critically, and level with viewers, users, and readers, about its source and even the purpose of the provider.

Journalists who figure this out, and add this level of media literate context, will actually be doing consumers a service. The option of not using such content at all is certainly laudable, but becoming less, and less, realistic. Provide honest context and full disclosure, understand the motives of content providers, and level with viewers about how something finds its way into a newscast or web story, and be critical if appropriate. That’s a brand of news that serves the public and will keep them coming back for more.

(Final full disclosure. I consulted with thenewsmarket.com, briefly, more than two years ago.)