PressEthic

WABC Radio news woke me up this morning, and I didn’t actually believe what they were reporting. The Newark government paying a newspaper to publish positive stories? No way. But I had to make sure. . . There was nothing in the New York Times, nothing in the Washington Post, but then I googled a few keywords and found this Star Ledger article by Jeffery C. Mays, City council will pay for good news in Newark.

Mays begins:

In politics, they say no news is good news.

In public relations, they say good news is something money can't buy.

But Newark Mayor Sharpe James and the city council have found a way to buy good news.

The council has hired a fledgling newspaper called Newark Weekly News to publish "positive news" about the city -- and will pay $100,000 over the next year for it.

Not surprisingly, there are many critics, with Mays quoting:

But Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., said the use of taxpayer money to disguise government-issued news as fair and unbalanced reporting is wrong.

"If you are publishing government propaganda in the guise of neutral, detached reporting, that's about as unethical as you can get short of putting a hit out on somebody," Clark said.

Just when I was thinking this story couldn’t get any worse, I read this:

The paper must "generate stories based on leads from (the) Municipal Council and Administration, namely Donna Purnell (the city's acting communications manager and James' spokeswoman) and Brenda Jones (a communications staffer), which will run in "Visions Metro Weekly/Newark Weekly news for distribution to the community."

Can everyone say “propaganda?” We don’t live in Russia! The American media can print whatever it wants. Freedom of speech is one of our core rights, and this newspaper is selling that right away? It’s like buying votes or paying people not to bear arms.

I think we would all agree that this is unethical, but is it even allowed? With the recent controversies concerning the government’s manipulation of the media, do there need to be new laws set, stricter regulations, a solid divide? And, why isn’t this bigger news? Why did I hear this on WABC Radio but found nothing in the NYT?