In a TV news show, commercials are supposed to be shown in between news segments.
Of, if only that were so!
What many viewers do not realize is that the "news segments" are often just as commercial as the commercials.
TV News has been so polluted by corporate commercialism that it is worse than worthless. I say worse than worthless because many people still turn to TV news as a source of quality information and that is not what they are getting. So they remain grossly uninformed but are under the impression they are informed. That's a dangerous combo.
I am here to tell you that the current financial collapse has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that TV News has been overtaken by public relations lies.
Public relations copy is often the basis for what you hear on the TV news. It may get re-written a little bit, but it is still biased toward the company it was originally written for. THAT IS WHAT YOU CALL AN ADVERTISEMENT, NOT NEWS. Press releases flood newsrooms across America everyday. Press releases are NOT a source of quality unbiased information, but they are treated as such.
No one likes a Tattle Tale
The TV station owners do not want real news. Real news is usually an unpleasant truth. Someone is ripping someone off or breaking the law in some way. Few people want such unpleasant truths exposed. Certainly not the lawbreaker. If the lawbreaker happens to be an advertiser at the TV station, you can bet that the sales department does not want the news department blabbing on the air that their customer is a crook.
News flash! Your friendly local car dealer is selling wrecked cars duct taped together, but we can't tell you that because they'll cancel their huge advertising contract.
Back when I worked in TV news, it became common for the general manager to walk up to a reporter and say, "My client called me and said you were snooping around. I don't think you need to be doing that."
End of that crook story.
Or, the sales department would want the news department to do a nice puff piece on the client and what a wonderful service they offered. It became common practice for the sales department to include a puff news piece in with their package of commercials!
When I first got into TV news in the early 80's, I worked for WSMV-TV in Nashville, TN and they were a bastion of real journalism. They company that owned the station encouraged journalism. They hired managers who were fearless, dedicated journalists. The station's award winning investigative reporting went so far as to bring down a governor, Ray Blanton, who ended up in the federal pen for illegally selling prison pardons. Doing that not only took reporting skills, it also took courage to stand up to power. It took money and patience to discover the truth and triple check it. No reporter can do this sort of thing unless they have owners and managers who back them up and are willing to take the heat.
No one likes a tattle tale.
Flash forward 20 years and the same station is owned by out-of-town corporate owners. We're having a big station-wide meeting. The corporate news director is laughing at the station's journalistic heritage. "Journalism does not work!" he proclaims. He has "research" to back it up. Viewers WANT flash and trash, he insists. Journalism is boring! No one watches PBS, don't kid yourself.
He was quite confident in his position. There was no way WSMV was going to do real journalism anymore. Doing journalism was for fools.
We as employees did not have a choice. If we wanted to keep our jobs, we had to do as our supreme commander insisted.
One subject I had liked covering was predatory lending. Predatory lending was fairly new and it APPALLED me. (This was early 2000) Banking laws were taken from Fast Buck Freddy's playbook. Banks and lending institutions were able to get away with pure theft. Loan contracts, written by high priced lawyers, were designed to rip unsuspecting customers off.
This was LEGAL? I could not believe it. I met customers who had been paying their mortgages faithfully, on-time for years yet they owed more than their original principal balance!
Customers were being charged up to 400% APR.
What? How is this legal? Well, come to find out that lawmakers all over the country, local, state and federal, democrat and republican, were allowing it to happen. Customer protection laws were thrown out the window. New laws were written that allowed banks to become nothing more than loan sharks.
Predatory lending stories were stopped by the new "No Journalism" rule. Banks and Predatory Lending institutions were paying customers after all! We can't embarrass advertisers by calling them crooks!
Today's financial collapse is one result of this moratorium on predatory lending stories. Predatory lending became so common, but you never heard about it on the news! If you did hear about it, you got the bank's PR version of the story. Customers are wanting bad loans! Customers are MAKING us do this! We're the good guys!
Bullshit.
If TV news did a good job, this financial collapse and all the shenanigans surrounding it never could have happened. I do not believe for one minute that financial networks truly did not know what was going on. They did. They just didn't report on it. They took the corporations side and only presented the glossed over "truth."
I finally left TV news because I would rather shovel poo at the zoo than shovel PR poo on TV.
My only recourse was to do a You Tube video parody on predatory lending. It is a take-off on a commercial that was run constantly on the station where I used to work.
So instead of being warned by journalists, people are manipulated by corporate PR. And we all know the result. Economic collapse and TV "experts" like Jim Cramer telling Jon Stewart that "Nobody could have seen this coming!"
Bull. I saw it coming for years. Everybody else would have seen it too if I had been allowed to do my job as a TV JOURNALIST. Instead, all you get is my You Tube parody! Sorry. I really am. But I did the best I could. I stood up to the bozo boss at the meeting and all the employees applauded. It didn't make any difference. I just got labeled a know-it-all nerd who didn't know how to be a team player!
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