Product placement on TV news

Fox affiliate KVVU in Las Vegas has started putting McDonalds iced coffee cups on the news desk during the morning show.

The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.

“If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.

From the NY Times

Links for April 22, 2008

NYTimes - Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.

Flickr post (via BoingBoing) - Radio for back up, an illustration of what's happening in the UK regarding public photography. Changing laws, could set a global precedent in our ongoing war on terror. Must investigate topic further.

Ad Age- Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Resigns... for later reference.

Robert Greene, co-founder of Investigative Reporters and Editors, dies

From NYTimes, April 12, 2008:

Robert W. Greene, a reporter and editor at Newsday who led investigative teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes and brought together reporters from across the country to uncover corruption in Arizona after a journalist there was murdered, died Thursday in Smithtown, N.Y. He was 78.

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Kathleen, said.

The Pulitzers notwithstanding, Mr. Greene regarded what became known as the Arizona Project as the greatest achievement of his 37-year career at Newsday, Long Island’s dominant newspaper.

The project began after Don Bolles, a reporter for The Arizona Republic who had been investigating ties between organized crime and politicians, was killed by a car bomb on June 13, 1976. Mr. Bolles had been a founding member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a national organization that Mr. Greene had helped start.

Mr. Greene assembled a team from that organization, and they spent six months in Phoenix putting together a 23-part series that expanded the investigation that Mr. Bolles had begun; it ran in newspapers around the country.

I've not heard of the Arizona affair, but sounds worth looking into (if anyone has sources to recommend).

Links for Thursday, March 20

NYT - British papers apologize to McCann's for murder allegations.

Adverganza - This ad blog posted what it calls the Iliad of corrections.

Secret Libel suits

Quick link while at work:

Executive Wants to Sue for Libel, but Only if He Can Do It Secretly, appearing March 3 in the NY Times.

NYTimes on journalistic ethics

The New York Times Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism... for those dying to read it.

NSA spying story taken from LAT to NYT

I'm also posting this Blotter (ABC News) story about the genesis of the AT&T/NSA debacle for later perusal and understanding.

Talk to the Newsroom

This "column" by NY Times Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman, could be seen as an exercise in media literacy and transparency, or just PR. It's interesting how similar the language can be.

Talk to the Newsroom: Philip Taubman.

Of course, in addition to being in a cynical mood, I read nothing but press releases all day, so I may be seeing something that isn't there.

Here is the full Talk to the Newsroom page.