Local TV stations pushed the same Amazon-scripted segment | Hacker News Reader

Local TV stations pushed the same Amazon-scripted segment

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299 pointsedward102 comments

Yeah... my eyebrows raised the first time I heard about this type of thing. Someone I know was in a news segment shot and produced by some company I had never heard of before (I don't recall the name). They said it would be on the news. The segment was produced, and when I asked where it was going to air, they said "50-60 local news stations around the country" and I was baffled... don't local news stations just produce their own news? No, not all of it.

There are companies like Sinclair and Scripps that produce and purchase news segments, and then run them in their own markets, and sometimes these companies will literally BUY news from companies that the news is about! And those companies, sometimes marketing or PR companies, are telling their own stories. It's "white label news". I guess the equivalent is what we call "advertorials" online?

And some links for anyone who wants to see more about these topics...

Sinclair Broadcasting owns local stations, most likely at least one near you: http://sbgi.net/tv-stations/

Scripps I believe is a bit smaller, but also owns a lot of local stations: https://scripps.com/our-brands/local-media/

So if Sinclair and Scripps both run the same newswire story, for instance, that is a country full of people getting it through their local -- often "most trusted" -- news station. A lot of stations get the "final say" on what does and doesn't run, but sometimes they do not.

Wikipedia entry for "Video news release": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_news_release

Wikipedia entry for "Satellite media tour": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_media_tour

And finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_literacy

A video about Sinclair from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

Yup; don't ever believe any news outlets is independent, they are often owned by a single entity. In the UK for example, most media is owned by News Corp., aka Rupert Murdoch. They have the power to change the narrative and public opinion, and with that, sway elections in their favor.

I feel like politics nowadays is not so much a fight between politicians, but between corporations with conflicting interests and the handful of people at the top behind them, and the parties paying them (including foreign powers).

> most media is owned by News Corp

This I'm afraid isn't true, though it may feel like it.

None of the free-to-air TV channels are owned by News Corp, which remains the purview of BBC and ITV in the main. It has minimal investment in radio stations. It has The Sun, The Times and Sunday Times. It used to have the News of the World.

It doesn't have the Mail, Express, Independent, Guardian, Mirror etc.

In terms of revenue globally, the top five are: AT&T, Comcast, Disney, ViacomCBS, and Fox. The are mainstream media oligopolies in most countries these days, but the beauty of the internet is that independent journalists and voices who have been shut-out and banned from the corporate-establishment fold like Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges can still find tiny soap-boxes to speak truth to power since almost no one else is doing it. Then there's people like Jimmy Dore who will never get taken seriously by the establishment because he doesn't have the wealth, pedigree, or entitled rich-dbag attitude to be let into their club.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

Competing brands of hegemonic, despotic, inverted totalitarian feudal lords vying for the Iron Throne. Bezos may ultimately be the first trillionaire as Tim Cook has clearly ran out of gas and is piloting a doomed A380 dinosaur into the drink. Ultimately, I think the first trillionaire will probably be Chinese because of China's rapid and potentially-large and long-lasting ascendancy.

Ultimately, it is and always will be a powerful few who have too much against the many who have too little.

Tim Cook isn't even a billionaire.... and Bezes only has a 1/10 of a Trillion, which is still many orders of magnitude more than Cook.

If your were instead talking about the coorporations they lead, they have been trillion dollar companies for a long time. And Apple is enjoying ts best years.

But online there are legal requirements around marking ads as ads. Is there no such law for televised news?

The FCC’s advertising disclosure rules apply to every form of broadcast media.

Ah, but what's the definition of advertising? Probably requires the station to get paid, right? So what happens if the station airs the segment the company produced for free because it lets them be lazy and not hire as many reporters to fill their airtime?

It actually becomes a tough line to draw, because a lot of huge conglomerates own media organizations. If you carry a coronavirus story produced by ABC, do you have to regard it as advertising because ABC is owned by Disney and the virus severely impacts their theme parks?

Doesn’t much news involve heavy ... collusion with the subject of or source of the story?

Having it completely produced by the subject isn’t a big leap from the current situation with many publishers and reporters.

There seems to be very little news which isn’t engineered to benefit one group or another. In other words real, objective, and independent reporting seems to be quite rare, and the mistaken expectation that most news is exactly that seems to be very common.

This is a pretty cynical take. I think most (not all, but most) news organizations are trying to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest.

Cynical – I don't like the adjective, turning a school of philosophy poorly understood into a generic term for being overly negative implying that negativity comes from ignorance...

My point being, I'm not just guessing. Seeing the sausage being made a few times is enlightening.

Then the questions about what motivations the reporter and source had making up every story you read become obvious and pervasive and "truth" "relevance" and "ethics" just don't seem to be at the top. Not that those things are completely ignored, just not at the top for everyone involved just looking out for their best interests. You don't have to be wildly corrupt for everybody to have each others best interests as their own best interests and what you get is mostly useless news consisting of people cheerleading for each other and some cause which isn't anywhere near that set of ideals.

What books or literature do you suggest to learn more about making these sausages?

One book in particular comes to mind:

Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

While the titular premise of the book is compelling and contains (and in part inspired) many of my opinions on the subject, I also found it baffling and infuriating biased version of (at the time) recent history it presented even though I am generally politically aligned with the presented bias. It seemed in extremely bad taste to write a book about media bias containing so much of its own biased version of history. I had to put it down several times and never finished it. At the same time, it is 32 years old and the landscape has changed very much.

Still quite good.

Watch The West Wing and The Newsroom, both headed by Aaron Sorkin, both fiction, but based on quite a lot of real world research in the White House and newsrooms. (while perhaps being at times a bit overly ham-fisted about their own ideals)

Otherwise, a bit of a ridiculous suggestion, get a job in the PR department of a small company or a news organization ... or make a close acquaintance with somebody who has one.

I am not sure that anybody has written the book that everybody needs to read on the subject. It would take a lot of guts and self-awareness for someone to write a memoir about their own biases or behaviours on the subject, and for people coming from the outside it would be difficult to come at the subject without more than a hint of confirming their pre-existing ideas, especially in these days of the "fake news" culture war where neither side of the political divide seems particularly interested in nuanced truth.

Here's an easy example of "news", imagine how and why the following was written. Imagine the people involved, what their motivations are, the past present, and future of the relationships between them.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/zipline-begins-us-medical-...

In short: I don't have any great recommendations of one thing to grok the situation.

That’s not at all what “cynical” means. From Merriam-Webster: “contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives.”

I intended exactly that meaning. Not “being overly negative.”

And your response solidifies my diagnosis. Do you permit no noble actions by mankind? Is all corrupt, inept, perverted? That way of looking at the world is poison.

I started a project to track news articles across various sites, the idea was to get multiple takes on the same subject and ideally a more informed, less partisan view.

It uh, did not pan out. Most news sites publish nearly identical articles, stuff them with ads and affiliate links and fill in the dots with a few low brow opinion pieces catered to the audience for that site.

Pretty depressing discovery on my part.

It isn't. It's reality. It's actually naive to think that news organizations are trying to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest.

Pick any news organization and go read its history. Who created it and why it was created. No news organization was created to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest. They were all created to push a political/economic agenda - aka propaganda.

>There seems to be very little news which isn’t engineered to benefit one group or another.

I'll go further and say a lot of "news" is just activism, pushing a political agenda. In some cases it's blatantly obvious, and in some cases it's not, and you have to dig a little deeper to find out. It's starting to become a problem in Denmark as well, because most american trends make their way here on a time delay - good or bad.

Eh, I wouldn't lean on it that much. Yes, a significant factor, but activism or its appearance is in many ways more an effect of finding and cultivating an audience and optimizing for their attention, and ultimately things like advertising dollars and social media likes and such.

I think there is this insidious link between people's opinions and "biased" news coverage where they are both spontaneously emerging and evolving and in effect causing one another specifically not being driven by an external activist idealism but emerging from the motivation to make money and get attention - which I think is much more dangerous and scary than if the news was being driven by some intentional agenda. Like it's this organism or disease which is evolving to take maximum advantage of human weaknesses, on one side of the publisher for the needs and rewards of money and approval, on the side of the consumer for what grabs attentions, builds loyalty, and shapes opinions. It's this monster that is shaping the human world out of control.

It is also possible that it is 2am and I have been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.

The true fake news

So it turns out local news isn’t actually public service, but really just the cheapest crap they can produce to run between ads for local car dealers. Go figure.

Didn't used to be this way, the FCC used to be much more serious about treating public airways as the public resource that they are.

Yes.

Some background[1] on the change.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/revisiting-the-broadcast-...

It used to be "broadcast" was really broadcast over limited public airwaves. Now it's all IPTV and streams and there is no practical limit on the amount of content that can be distributed, which was always the justification for regulating it.

The real problem now is nobody wants to pay for anything when the competition is free. "You're not the customer, you're the product" doesn't only apply to Google.

100% percent of the stations listed in the article have broadcast over the air stations (their FCC callsigns are given). I couldn't speculate how many people consume these station's content via broadcast versus some other medium, though. I wouldn't be too surprised if it was more than a few years ago, but definitely significantly less than 20+ years ago.

As as aside, as someone who works in the regulated radio industry, I actually wish there was more enforcement of FCC rules. As is, they are mainly a regulatory body, not an enforcement one - its extremely unlikely you will receive the FCC's attention for operating without a license or breaking other rules. But, please dont do these things, its easy and inexpensive to get amateur/personal/business licenses and you risk interfering with public safety or other critical users of the radio spectrum. Here's a list of enforcement actions for rule violations and unlicensed operation: https://transition.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/

> 100% percent of the stations listed in the article have broadcast over the air stations (their FCC callsigns are given). I couldn't speculate how many people consume these station's content via broadcast versus some other medium, though.

Even the percentage doesn't really matter because the scarcity isn't there anymore. You don't have to get on broadcast TV in order to reach an audience anymore. PewDiePie has more subscribers than Fox and NBC have viewers combined.

When broadcast TV was the only way to deliver video to millions of people, you had to care what was using that capacity because it came at the expense of carrying something else. Now it's just one more way to deliver bits.

If anything it's now YouTube in that position, because they're just about the only way for ordinary people to reach a large audience. But in that case the constraint still isn't that they're carrying something bad instead of something good, since everything is carried in addition to rather than instead of everything else, but rather that they might refuse to carry something good which then has no other reasonable alternative for distribution.

At least that is legit business.

If you have the misfortune to listen to the really crazy radical talk radio, it’s all scams and thinly veiled money laundering via ads.

I would welcome something radical. Most stations have been taken over by some national streaming entity.

Actually it's more dangerous than some lunatic. Their lies are more likely to become the truth for the majority.

This is literally all they do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI

I'd forgotten how good that is.

This was the first video that popped into my head after watching the video from TFA. I've seen similar ones in the past for talking points against political candidates and such. One that sticks out was "gravitas", a word parroted by media everywhere during an election cycle some years ago. This is a big part of why I avoid "news" anymore.

"optics" entered the news vernacular very recently, now everyone uses it.

This one drives me nuts when the Sunday morning bobble heads toss the wrong word around when they want to use "perception".

'Optics' implies objectivity while 'perception' implies subjectivity. It makes them sound more authoritative.

>when they want to use "perception".

Or "PR". I'd hear "doing that would make for bad optics" where I'd previously "... for bad PR". It irritates me for some reason.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

Screenwriter for House of Cards: "Man, this job is impossible. Every time I come up with something scandalous, corrupt, or intriguing to write about, the real Federal government front-runs it and steals my thunder. I give up. I'm going to call my pal Charlie Brooker and see if Black Mirror needs any help in the screenwriting department."

...

"Goddamn it so much."

More seriously, I don't understand how this is two years old and I'm just now seeing it for the first time. Incredibly powerful video, and scary as hell.

For anyone interested in hearing more about this, John Oliver ran a segment on this -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

Thank you for posting this. Now I'm curious about my own country.

Whether it's companies or governments, press briefings are already an entirely accepted thing. If you think about it, it's a scary concept - someone with a clear motivation to control the story picks journalists they like, invites them to a place of their choosing and feeds them a carefully constructed narrative.

Flat out doing the segment for them seems like the natural next step.

And if the reporters step out of line they're under threat to be banned from coming back which could be career suicide for losing the spot for your employer.

But there's a big difference: a press release is very up-front about being a curated message from the company. The scary thing here is that it's masquerading as independent coverage.

>“I was not aware the package was provided by Amazon.” Armstead said, “We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Where did it come from exactly?

Did a segment just show up on his desk on a USB drive and he thought "oh look a video... we should run this"?

Businesswire: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200521005268/en/Ama...

>UPDATE: Amazon responded by stating the video and script were published to Business Wire as are many other companies’ in-house produced content for media organizations.

Local news doesn't have budgets to do in-depth reporting 24/7 so they use the newswires to get stories to fill time.

You can see the wire post here.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200521005268/en/Ama...

Title is very misleading.

>> News package elements without narration for local anchor voiceover.

Title isn't misleading at all.

"It happens all the time" doesn't make it misleading, or invalid. In fact that makes it far worse.

It needs to be declared. It doesn't matter if they're reading from Amazon's packet or the Pentagons, a declaration is appropriate and even vital to help maintain a healthy democracy.

What's odd is that if a YouTuber did this the FCC's regulations[0] require they disclose it, but not local TV stations evidently?

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

I think you don't understand the difference between a press release and an advertisement.

This is a press release, the FTC link is about endorsements (which are advertising).

YouTubers would not be required to disclose this.

It is an advertisement distributed in the form of a press release (or more accurately a media packet with included script and video content).

Using the term "press release" like it is some kind of legal shield is non sequitur. It doesn't matter if the ad is a billboard, graphic, sidewalk spinner, or press release it is still an advert designed to promote Amazon, and an undisclosed one at that.

If a YouTuber wasn't required to declare it, that would be wrong too.

Can a company issue a press release talking about their products or business without it being an ad by your standard?

Like what would a hypothetical press release for the release of the Xbox 360 that isn’t an ad look like?

> Can a company issue a press release talking about their products or business without it being an ad by your standard?

I think you've lost sight of what we're discussing.

We're not discussing the morality of press releases, what we're discussing is a THIRD PARTY media organization reading from a script and re-showing video footage sent to them from a company without declaring that they're doing so. It is the repetition without source-context that is the sin, not the original company's media publications.

So are Microsoft's press releases about the XBox 360 ads? Yes. Is that wrong? Absolutely not. The "wrong" is a different media company taking that content and repeating it verbatim without declaration or contextualization (e.g. quotation marks).

If money (or other benefits) changed hands between the company benefiting and the media company reporting, that only compounds the immorality of it.

Has the title been updated? Nothing about “Local TV stations pushed the same Amazon-scripted segment” seems at all misleading to me. Amazon has confirmed that they scripted the segment and produced the content. And there’s clear video evidence that 11 news stations aired the Amazon-produced content verbatim.

Pushed implies someone with power over the network made it happen to benefit Amazon.

Change it to "used" or something like that and it would be reasonably accurate, if completely lacking in context.

Business Wire isn’t a news wire service, though. Examples of those would be the Associated Press and Reuters. It’s a wire service for the distribution of corporate press releases, which by definition are going to be biased.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place in the news world for services like Business Wire - corporate press releases can be valuable sources of information. Just that any reporter who would take something off Business Wire and run it verbatim as a news item is not very good at their job.

Company press releases are used as news stories all the time.

Look what happens when google/Apple/Microsoft announces a new product.

You may not consider press releases news but they are. Not all news needs to be investigative in nature.

> In response to a request for comment on why the station ran the package, Wes Armstead, news director of the Bluefield NBC affiliate WVVA, told COURIER, “I was not aware the package was provided by Amazon.” Armstead said, “We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Mr. Armstead is either blatantly lying or astoundingly incompetent if he's seriously going to claim that he has no knowledge of his station's news sources.

When in doubt, the package is from Amazon

The version where he honestly didn't know is a lot scarier.

This has been going on forever. Magazine content in particular was often written by PR departments of various companies. Even when it wasn't, the "journalist" writing it knew that if he didn't write what the company wanted, he wouldn't get invited to junkets, press parties, etc.

Just yesterday, the NY Times ran a prominent Opinion piece that read to me like a promotion for the author's book. Pretty great marketing.

I'm both concerned and relieved people are noticing this. For over a decade media has repeated government press releases as fact, often word for word. For a long time they've "covered" corporate crap the same way ("thanks for filling the spaces between our adds, we don't care what you say"). People seem to have a real issue with Amazon (for good reason) so now they're starting this BS, maybe it will be questioned?

Paul Graham talked about this in this essay http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Herman and Chomsky wrote “Manufacturing Consent” in 1988. It’s a comprehensive description of the media propaganda system, of which this Amazon thing is a single example.

This is a little old, but is probably fairly relevant...

https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/03/15/over-half-your-news-is-...

I can't speak highly enough of Crikey, totally worth the subscription. Journalism as it was meant to be.

TL;DR of the above:

"2203 stories. 10 newspapers. A five day snapshot. Six months’ worth of research"

"Crikey reveals the results of a six-month investigation into the role PR plays in the Australian media, finding that 55% of newspaper stories analysed were driven by PR."

I have a feeling that the story may be past its "sell-by" date:

https://www.crikey.com.au/spinning-the-media/

I would not get a subscription to view that story (it is probably the only one that is relevant to me, in the US), as I'll bet I would get the sub, and the story would still be dead.

Which makes me very sad. I believe in supporting these types of orgs, but they need to deliver (Crikey is not cheap - https://www.crikey.com.au/subscribe/ ).

Crikey is a small news company based in, and only really concerned with, Australia. Yeah, it definitely wouldn't be a worthwhile subscription for anyone not specifically interested in Australian news, I probably should have disclaimered that.

I logged in with my account and, yes, that story is dead, there's no content. That's disappointing.

I'll send them a notification and see if they'll put it up without a paywall since it's relatively old content (but still pertinent).

Edit: notification sent.

Cool. It would be great to see the original (I never read the whole thing).

Most newspapers and magazines in the US have some kind of "fee-per-article" archival service. Some will allow unfettered access to their archives with a regular subscription, but others may ask a fee, even for subscribers.

NYT has its "TimesMachine": https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/ I'm not sure if it's available to non-subscribers. I am a subscriber, but I need to purchase page reprints.

Crikey support got back to me and offered me this link:

https://www.crikey.com.au/topic/spinning-the-media/

There are a lot of articles listed, but if you scroll down there will be a clump that are actually entitled "spinning the media" all of which are dated in March 2010, which are all the parts to their 'special investigation'.

This article is almost directly relatable to the topic of this thread: https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/03/25/spinning-the-media-pre-...

(and it's from 2010 - we've had a decade of normalization between that article and the one that initiated this thread!)

P.S. No paywall!

Awesome! Thanks!

That is quite a collection!

I've heard before that this is common practice, both for written articles and segments. It does seem like an unhealthy relationship to have journalists in a position where they have to either run with what they're given or risk being excluded by private organizations in future press interactions. But that is a bigger societal problem we are exposed to, beyond just Amazon.

I would think that it bodes well for society for journalists to be excluded by private organisations in future press interactions. It only bodes poorly for the individual journalist that would be receiving special treatment from said private organisations.

Enforced exclusion from press interactions by a private organization is its own story worthy of publishing, and likely bad PR.

It’s cooperate or die. The easy sources are mostly gone... mid level political people and normal workers can be hunted down pretty easily with modern tech, and subject to criminal sanction in some cases.

A close relative was a well known local public official in the 80s and 90s. In those days, the investigative reporters made more than he did and were relentless. In one case, he caught a guy climbing into the plenum over a ceiling tile to try to hear portions of a meeting in executive session.

Now, good reporters aspire to work in PR shops.

We'll its also cooperate and die. As increased cooperation undermines any trust in the news organization which contributes to diminished viewer/readership.

South Park satirized it best: https://youtu.be/z696bTiP8Ro

The concept is nothing new, PR firms have been providing packed content for news consumption for years, and news organisations with ever decreasing budgets and time simply use them verbatim.

I’m sure there are criticisms about specific points, there always are, but I was aghast reading Flat Earth News a decade ago. I encourage everyone to pick up a copy for £3 on kindle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Davies#Critical_reaction_...

This is correct. Had a friend in PR who did this sort of thing. They have money and time, and local news stations do not.

It's probably not so bad when the piece is on the wonders of asparagus and why you should eat more.

It is that bad (imo), unless it's clearly stated that it's a paid advertisement (that's what PR is), then you cannot trust your news source.

But it’s not a paid advertisement. It’s a corporate blog post published to an RSS feed for journalists to do with as they please.

It’s worse than a paid advertisement because news orgs are running it for free and doing absolutely nothing novel or critical with it.

Their not paying for it? That doesn't seem right.

This dark pattern is particular bad when extended to critical things, like national politics. Political think-tanks did a mass campaign like this to build the narrative for the Iraq War.

Heritage Foundation is one of the really bad actors here.

HN discovers the concept of "Press Packet"?

And businesswire, newswires in general, press releases, and lazy reporting! All at once!

But really though. It’s one thing to buy air time or use your controlling interest in news stations to run misinformation campaigns. Publishing an article to what is essentially an RSS feed for journalists and them running the story verbatim is on the news station, not the company.

According to Amazon, it was just a press release, which they pushed via the same channels they push any other press release. (See the update at the end of the article.)

I wasn't aware press releases could include a script for a presenter. Is this really common? What is the industry name for these packages?

"Slow news day"

"No one left in the newsroom."

"Copy/paste"?

“Controlling the narrative”

They're called "video news releases" (VNRs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_news_release.

Thanks for this. I'm absolutely in shock this process is so industrialized, and that it has apparently managed to survive so long, and even through fake news being a huge topic in US politics

I would guess because there’s no real coercion in it. A company has every interest to make it as easy as possible to news outlets to run the story and to so they write the whole thing and leave it to the journalists if they want to do anything else with it. Some - many - are lazy and just publish it verbatim.

https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20200521005268/en/793115/...

It apparently can.

Actual press releases are clearly labeled for the end consumer as press releases.

Yes but in that case it’s the news outlet that’s at fault. Most news orgs will at least say something like “Amazon released a statement today detailing…” If someone publishes the thing verbatim there’s no one to blame but the editor.

I LOVE myself some dystopian 80s sci-fi.. On my TV! not in my reality!

As others have said, this is apparently a common practice, but what does it mean for the credibility of The Washington Post? If a Bezos-run has no problems pushing a press release as news, what's to stop a Bezos-owned newspaper from doing the same?

I'm so glad that this is illegal in the UK

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