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.
"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...
This is a press release, the FTC link is about endorsements (which are advertising).
YouTubers would not be required to disclose this.
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.
Like what would a hypothetical press release for the release of the Xbox 360 that isn’t an ad look like?
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.
Change it to "used" or something like that and it would be reasonably accurate, if completely lacking in context.
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.
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.