I was watching a local Dallas station this morning, and a person I presumed to be a local reporter was talking about Home Depot. The Home Depot video shot had "California! Home of Home Depot" so I knew I wasn't watching anything that was created by a local investigative team, even though the news program was labeled "Local Dallas News" or something similar. In fact, I looked up the reporter's name and saw he's based out of LA. That's not exactly the type of *fake news* I'm about to talk about, but it veers into it. If I watch a news show that doesn't clearly identify that the report is not from the DFW area, then it's a little misleading. I understand that the way a lot of media works now is that, to cut costs, they have a news segment that gets played in a number of markets; and to do that, you have to make it appear that the news is local. But at least that was for an investigative bit of news and not trying to sell you something.

VNR's on the other hand, are PR videos that are designed to look like news... but aren't identified as such when you watch them. PR Watch talked about this some time back in a report that investigated how many of these so-called news spots go out, but we, the watchers, don't know that they weren't actually done by the station, but by some corporate marketing flack somewhere. The FCC some months back promised to crack down on this; really, all that needs to be done is to identify the source of the video. PRWatch's summary is here

The ongoing controversy over video news releases has not stopped television stations from airing the fake news segments without attribution. Over six months, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented 46 stations in 22 states airing at least one VNR in their newscast. Of the 54 total VNR broadcasts described in this report, 48 provided no disclosure of the nature or source of the sponsored video. In the six other cases, disclosure was fleeting and often ambiguous. Ten of the TV stations named in this study were also cited in CMD's April 2006 "Fake TV News" report, for undisclosed VNR broadcasts. These findings suggest that station and industry codes of conduct