Page 566 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

V deo News Releases: A H dden Ep dem c of Fake TV News |

the TV station provide clear disclosure of the source of the VNR footage to news
viewers.
Peter Simmons, an Australian academic with Charles Sturt University’s
School of Communications, has written that “individual journalists and pub-
lic relations practitioners perceive their work to be enhanced when news re-
lease material is used without disclosure.” Another finding of the Center for
Media and Democracy’s study supports his assertion. When one PR firm
started mentioning the sponsors at the end of its prepackaged VNRs, using
on-screen labels and verbal statements, TV stations removed these notifica-
tions and still failed to provide disclosure to viewers in 12 out of the 15 in-
stances documented.

Case study: “oil loBByist’s ‘news’ denies
inConVenient truths”
In June 2006, the broadcast PR firm Medialink Worldwide put out a VNR titled, “Global
Warming and Hurricanes: All Hot Air?” The firm identified “TCS Daily Science Roundtable”
as the client behind the segment. But Medialink didn’t disclose that TCS Daily is a Web site
published by Tech Central Station and was, at the time, a project of the Republican lobbying
and PR firm DCI Group. Or that DCI Group counts among its clients ExxonMobil. Or that
ExxonMobil gave the Tech Central Science Foundation $95,000 in 2003, for “climate change
support.”
The VNR features Dr. William Gray and Dr. James J. O’Brien, who are identified as “two
of the nation’s top weather and ocean scientists.” Gray denies that there’s any link between
global warming and the severity of recent hurricane seasons. “We don’t think that’s the
case,” he says. “This is the way nature sometimes works.”
In reality, the link between climate change and hurricane severity has not been disproved.
Peer-reviewed scientific studies on the issue have reached conflicting conclusions, though
an in-depth analysis reported in September 2006 found “a large human influence” on rising
sea-surface temperatures, which lead to stronger hurricanes. The same month, Nature mag-
azine reported on a position paper from federal scientists that linked intensified hurricanes
to global warming; the document was reportedly quashed by the Bush administration.
Drs. Gray and O’Brien are meteorologists with extensive experience predicting hur-
ricanes. However, neither of them are impartial. In June 2006, Gray told the Denver Post
that global warming is a “hoax,” something that “they’ve been brainwashing us [with] for
20 years.” O’Brien is associated with corporate-funded organizations that question climate
change, as a member of Tech Central Station’s “Science Roundtable” and as an expert at
the George C. Marshall Institute.
Sadly, none of these affiliations, caveats, or complexities were communicated when
WTOK-11 (Meridian, Mississippi) aired as “news” an edited and revoiced version of the TCS
Daily VNR on May 31, 2006. Viewers were also not told that the segment was paid for and
scripted by oil company lobbyists.