News for Sale   

Advertisers' influence is seeping into television news.

TOM GRANT IS A TOUGH and tenacious reporter. An investigative journalist who has won two DuPont-Columbia awards among other honors, Grant has never been known to pull his punches. So perhaps it should not have surprised anyone that when he left KXLY-TV in Spokane, Washington, this spring, he didn't go quietly.
In a column for his new employer, Spokane's weekly newspaper the Local Planet, Grant said he quit television news partly because "when it comes time to deliver news, the lawyers and ad reps make the decisions." Grant listed eight specific issues he says he was forbidden to cover during his 15 years in TV news, including stories about bad car dealers and bad restaurants--whose owners just happen to spend boatloads of money advertising on local stations.
Grant's parting shot publicly confirmed what many viewers have long suspected about the influence of advertisers on news content. It's real, and it may be growing. In bad economic times, stations are under increasing pressure to be "creative" about finding new sources of revenue. Most of these deals aren't nearly as egregious as the effort a couple of years ago by a Chattanooga station to sell favorable news coverage to local businesses for $15,000 a pop. But because the connection between sales and news is usually less overt, it may also be more insidious.
Marci Burdick, a former news director who is now president and general manager of WAGT-TV in Augusta, Georgia, says she knows of stations that keep a printed list of people and issues they won't report on, for fear of alienating an advertiser. Some newsrooms take the opposite tack, openly suggesting that reporters first seek comment on an issue by calling people who spend money on the station. "If we're doing a story on imported cars," one news director told me, "we'd rather talk to the Honda dealer who advertises as opposed to the Toyota dealer who doesn't."
That might seem innocuous enough, until you consider what viewers are likely to think when they notice that so many of the people who get to talk on the news represent big advertisers. And what are they to make of deals in which a local hospital sponsors health segments that prominently feature medical experts mainly from that hospital? Viewers may well wonder why precious airtime is dedicated to sponsored reports that may have limited appeal--such as a fishing forecast. Are stations basing these decisions on news value or advertiser interest?
In the online world, the line between advertising and content isn't just blurring--it's vanishing. Take the case of INNX, which produces health-related features and sells them to stations at a reduced rate. In exchange, INNX gets an on-air promo and a sponsor link on the station's Web page, right next to the story headline. INNX's marketing pitch offers this example: "Following a story exposing the dangers of obesity, our adjacent advertisement associates a particular brand with an online 'call to action.' Through custom narration and animation, our correspondent, your anchor, or other narrator directs the viewers to an advertiser relevant to the story."
News managers defend these arrangements, insisting they--and not the advertisers--are responsible for editorial content. But viewers see things otherwise. In a 1998 survey by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, more than eight of 10 viewers said they believe that advertisers "often" or "sometimes" improperly influence the content of the news.
Concerned about the danger of outside influence on the credibility of local television news, RTNDF this fall will release specific guidelines on news and sales. The Hearst-Argyle Television group already has published internal guidelines, which tell stations to avoid direct sponsorship of individual news stories, including medical, consumer and education reports. But they leave the door open for sponsorship of other content, including traffic, weather, sports and remote cameras.
"The Panasonic traffic camera is not going to change the way the traffic is going into the Lincoln Tunnel," says Fred Young, senior vice president for news at Hearst-Argyle. "But you wouldn't want Motorola sponsoring a report on cell phones."
The bottom line, for Young, is to keep news and sales decisions separate to prevent short-term gains from hurting the station's news reputation. "People who sell the time can't be touching the news product," he says. "That's the long-term integrity of our stations."
It's an argument that may be hard to sell in the midst of an economic downturn that has slashed revenue from local advertising, leading to budget cuts and layoffs at many stations. But it's one sale every newsroom absolutely must close.