News Laundry

The “Karen Ryan” story gets more and more interesting. In case you haven’t been following it, many regional television stations ran a gushingly positive story about the new Medicare drug benefit. The report was filed by “Karen Ryan” from Washington. When a few people decided to do some background research on Ms. Ryan, they discovered that the story had not been produced by a news station or other journalist, but was instead a “Video News Release” or “VNR” produced at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services.

In other words, television stations across the country ran a government-made commercial announcement as “news.”

This story bubbled up to the surface long enough to rate a mention on the Daily Show, but I’ve seen less and less in the story… except at the Columbia Journalism Review, which is still on the case.

Now the CJR is describing how these VNRs—which are PR pieces and thus intentionally, inherently one-sided—could be confused with “real news” and run as such. You can read what they have to say here, but unfortunately they’re following so many threads at once the story isn’t particularly coherent. But the long and short of it is this:

A PR firm makes a Video News Release, and then sends it to a distributor. In this case, that distributor is CNN. CNN then passes the VNR on to its affiliates.

Here’s the problem.

First of all, CNN is wearing two hats. One hat is the news agency hat, like Associated Press or Reuters. They are a conduit for journalists to share news with many outlets. The other hat looks like the PR Newswire hat. PR Newswire collects press releases and passes those on to news agencies. Now, people in the business know that stuff coming from AP is journalist produced and stuff coming from PR Newswire came straight from the companies or agencies themselves. But with CNN distributing both kinds of news, things can get a little…confused. And that seems to have been what happened here. The Karen Ryan piece was supposed to be marked as a VNR but wasn’t.

The second problem is that CNN makes money on both ends. They charge the PR firms for distributing the piece, and they charge the local news agencies for using it. So it’s really in CNN’s best financial interests (as long as they don’t get caught) to “forget” to mark some pieces as VNR. More news stations will run the piece, and the promise of wide distribution will encourage more PR marketing business.

So that’s how our news is being made. Kinda yucky, isn’t it?