Fake News = VNR aka Video News Releases. You know how sometimes you're watching a segment on the news and it looks like it actually came from a marketing company as opposed to being done by the local station? If the video is supplied by a PR company, the station is supposed to identify the source so that people aren't misled into thinking they are watching news rather than a VNR with an agenda. You may have thought this only included the baloney VNRs that the Bush administration put out that weren't identified as propaganda pieces, but it is also, for example, so-called medical news that might be PR pieces from a pharm company.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission sent letters to 77 television stations to try to determine if they deceptively aired video press releases as if they were news reports, Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said.

The letters, dated Aug. 11, follow a nonprofit group's study which found that at least 77 stations, including seven each owned by Tribune Co. and Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., ignored an FCC warning to identify providers of advertisements from companies and government agencies.

``This is the beginning of the formal part of the investigation in which we attempt to get the facts from the stations and the policies they have in place,'' Adelstein, a Democrat, said in an interview today.

The FCC warned TV stations in April 2005 that they may be fined for airing videos provided by government agencies and companies without identifying the sources of the segments, as they are required to do. The FCC had received complaints about stations' use of Bush administration video news releases on topics including U.S. military action in Iraq during newscasts.

I saw a VNR on MSNBC earlier this year and had to gasp at the audaciousness of it. The *news* segment was introduced by the anchor as being about Women and Heart Attacks Being Helped by Low-Dose aspirin. The bit threw in a scientist and a woman looking at aspirins, mostly generic but lo and behold there was an identifiable bottle of Bayer Low-Dose aspirin in her hand. After the segment was over, after a station promo, on came an advertisement for... have you guessed? Bayer! The sneaky part was that I *thought* I was seeing an objective news piece about heart attacks... but it needed to be identified as to the source, that a PR company produced this for Bayer.