News They Shouldn’t Use
Knutsson reedited the VNR, dropping the narration of “Jim Lawrence” and writing his own and briefly discussing the problem of phishing live on camera. But when his report got rolling, there wasn’t much that didn’t come from Trend Micro. Where Lawrence had intoned that “software like PC-Cilin is your first line of defense,” Knutsson advised that “while software may help protect you, ultimately it all comes down to common sense.” But a Trend Micro security guru still weighed in on ways the public could protect itself, and PC-Cilin remained the one product mentioned by name.
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Sweedler’s overnight fame wasn’t limited to cities where the Tribune Company owns stations. According to a new survey by the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, versions of the VNR were carried by stations in Colorado Springs, Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Saint Louis, where a reporter simply replaced Lawrence’s voice with his own. In Oklahoma City a KOKH news anchor introduced Lawrence as if he were a KOKH reporter.
CyberGuy’s report on phishing was the only time CMD could identify a VNR showing up on a Chicago station. WGN simply aired what CyberGuy offered, and news director Greg Caputo says that if CMD had bothered to call him he’d have argued that Knutsson played down PC-Cilin and offered useful advice. He told me, “When you screen the piece you’re kind of left scratching your head–what fact in the piece isn’t true? What fact in his story is phony or false or fake?”
The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem
Publicists have their own professional organization, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and it has a code of ethics–not so exacting as the one written by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), but still a code. And provisions such as “We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public” and pledges such as to “work constantly to strengthen the public’s trust in the profession” strike some members as compromised by VNRs.
Sussman parts company with the CMD on one specific. The Web site where the CMD report is laid out urges the public to “tell the Federal Communications Commission that fake news must stop.” Sussman doesn’t want the FCC anywhere near the VNR debate. “It’s a journalism ethics issue,” he says. “It’s not a government ethics issue.” Government isn’t journalism’s big brother.
