Misc. Ramblings

Many people seem to have forgotten or, perhaps, are actively ignoring the fact that the public airwaves, in the US, are held in trust by the federal government. Business are allowed (i.e., licensed) to use parts of the airwaves for a public purpose.

As, perhaps, evidence of this problem, your local TV news programs may be more of an excuse for marketing products than a service to citizens. According to this report that says 77 TV stations in the US broadcasted what amounts to commercials created by companies or government agencies but aired as is they were regular news stories.

Indeed, according to the report, not only didn't the TV stations disclose that the segments were created by what may have been, in some cases, marketing companies but, in many cases, the stations actively tried to disguise this fact.

Even more distressing is that some of these stations are in major markets such as Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. In addition, the affiliates of all three major networks are included.

I don't know how many stations each of the following networks have, nor do I know how many were monitored to gather these numbers. Hence, I can't normalize or give context to this information. That said, here are the data :

Although there weren't any Hawaii stations listed, that doesn't mean they haven't used such segments. I seem to remember seeing several what would appear to be canned segments that looked suspiciously like what is being described in this article.

I've also posted before how some local stations use file footage but don't disclose this fact. Indeed, by not disclosing this, they are trying to mislead people into thinking the footage was taken specifically and recently for the story being reported.

In other cases, one local TV station used to go outside their back door to report "live" on the weather. Then they would go "live" outside their front door for traffic conditions. But in no case would they identify the fact that they were literally within feet of their station. This station still does these kinds of reports, but at least they now disclose where they are (at least the few times I watched their "news" program).

Then there are the stations that take news reports from the wire services or press releases from businesses or government agencies and literally just read it, verbatim. In no case do they make any effort whatsoever to investigate whether the report is accurate nor do they make any effort to find out if there is more to the story than the one-side account they just read to the public.

Aloha!