PressEthic

CNN - Be the First to Know; Fox News - Fair and Balanced; AP - The Essential Global News Network; CBS - Breaking World News; Reuters - Know. Now.; PBS - Be More.

Just a taster of what US based news organisations use to brand themselves. Is this any different to the heavily-marketed branding slogans of McDonald's: "I'm Loving It" or perhaps Ford: "Built for the Road Ahead."

McDonald's aims to show that their customers enjoy their product. Ford seems to say that their motor vehicles are well-built for the task in hand, ie driving on roads, as well as being sufficiently well-constructed that they can last well into the future.

Deconstructing the assertions made by the above news networks might be similarly straightforward. CNN aims to show that they break stories faster than anybody else, and if you watch CNN you will be ahead of the competition. Fox News, which was apparently launched in 1996 to counter the US media's liberal bias, and this concept is encapsulated in their assertions towards fair and balanced journalism or reporting. AP itself seems to claim that its news stories and pictures are essential, all over the world (and judging by US network and newspaper's incessant use of their wire feeds, footage and photographs, this would seem to be quite a fair assertion!)

It is only the above three that I am concerned with, given that their brand slogans intimate particular qualities about their newsgathering and broadcasting. Is it reasonable that CNN claims to be first on the scene in their branding strategy. The nature of global news reporting surely makes this an impossibility, with the constant hustling between agencies and broadcasters, accompanied by the differing choices made by news editors as to what exactly it is that CNN viewers are the first to know about?

And is Fox News really Fair and Balanced. This is surely a point which has been made before, no doubt far more polemically than I intend to do so, but is there any quantifiable basis for such an assertion. McDonald's or Ford do not seem to make claims about their products in their slogans, so do media networks feel that part of the requirements to operate in their particular business sector is the use of difficult-to-justify claims in their branding tags?

Perhaps such a line of reasoning is disingenuous, and the ad-men behind their market positioning have merely dictated that it be so. More likely the ad-men from the parent companies, Time Warner and News International, may have dreamt these up. Reuters and the rest may have used aspirational ones such as "Know. Now" for their catchiness, and no thought had in fact gone into whether claims made in such tags could ever be substantiated....

Either way, the fact that news broadcasters and disseminators control what their viewers and readers digest, they are in a strong position to market themselves effectively, and far more cheaply, than are many other industry leaders.