Press Releases, news releases, video news releases.
When companies want to give their marketing the sheen of respectability they turn to press releases. Want to pitch your product release a study that proves your project is needed. If it is a slow news day a newspaper will publish it. Your study doesn’t even need to be real. The newspaper isn’t checking.
If you’ve got the money you can take it another step that is much more frightening. The Video News Release. You do a whole news segment that is basically just marketing and send off the tape to every local station you can think of.
You can send the video with a script so their own people can narrate it, you can send it with narration, and you can even send it with your own fake news reporter on screen. The local stations will pretend it is a story, and even pretend that reporter is an expert on this issue. The fake reporter will even end her report with "back to you."
The government under Bush even pulled this stunt.
Here’s an example. Campbell’s soup produces a news segment of botulism and makes it all scary by saying how many died from it in the 20th century. Forget that all the deaths were from pre-world war II, that’s not important. Then end the segment on how canning companies such as "Campbell’s" have spent millions riding the country of this terrible disease (cut to Campbell’s factory).
Dozens maybe even hundreds of local stations will run the piece.
It’s not news, its advertising.
But local news coverage is 60 or 90 minutes and advertising money is dwindling. Real reporting is expensive so you’ll see a lot more fake news, but you won’t know a large part of the time that that is what you are getting.
This isn’t new, it is just happening more.
In the eighties I interviewed with a division of ABC News that made its money producing these things. Yes, that’s right in the eighties a division of ABC News made fake news. I’m not sure if they still do. I didn’t get the job probably because of my excellent interview skills. I was asked if I was interested and I said "ethics aside, sure." This probably wasn’t the right answer.
Anyway, why am I bringing this up, only because I saw this article:
Security breaches cost $1 trillion last year
The global economic downturn could put sensitive information at even more risk, according to a McAfee survey.
The global economic turmoil is putting vital information at greater risk than ever before, according to the findings of a new study published today.
Nearly two out of five (39 per cent) surveyed for the McAfee study, 'Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information', believed sensitive data and intellectual property (IP) is more vulnerable in the current economic climate than before.
Now McAfee is a company that makes a fine and necessary product, but seriously their study is just their elevator pitch given an authoritative sheen. And $1 trillion last year? That number is just plain made up... sorry I mean "estimated."
And newspapers will print it up not only as news but truth. Fact checking costs money.
And there are so many little lies you can tell.
Such as this: White House unbuttons formal dress code
Photos of jacketless Obama at White House may signal subtle culture shift
WASHINGTON - The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket.
...
Thus did a rule of the George W. Bush administration — coat and tie in the Oval Office at all times — fall by the wayside, only the first of many signs that a more informal culture is growing up in the White House under new management.
Except as many people have noted, there wasn’t such a Bush rule.
And you think it is a small thing, and it is, but it is a purposeful thing. It is all about the lie that Democrats don’t "respect’ the office.
Such as this amazing comment on FreeRepublic
"nother example of the disrespect he has. I'm sure baggy pants will be allowed as well. Probably someone has to flash a gang sign to get in as well. "
And
blatant disregard for the office he now occupies.
the man has dissed the office..
A little lie that the press didn’t bother fact checking, but it was meant to give a little meat to the ravenous horde. And it did.
Studies have shown that because of economic conditions your news will be even less real than before. And that is saying something.
I wonder when they’ll start printing excerpts from my site Sarah Louise Palin 2012 thinking its real.
Cross posted at my site: This Century Sucks (less)