As of this month, the mayor and city council of Newark, NJ have announced a sweetheart deal of a new kind. They are paying Legacy Media Group, publisher of a paper called "Visons Metro Weekly" $100,000 for a one-year contract to print "good news."
You heard it-- they're buying news and proudly putting out a press release about it. The idea is that positive things-- beneficial programs and the like-- are happening all the time, and no one bothers to write about it. From now on, the citizens of Newark will be sure to know when there's a new playground, or an exciting street hockey program.
These will not be advertisements.They will not be editorials. Hands down, they will look and feel just like regular news stories, except that they will really be rewritten press releases.
I respect the focus of "positive" news. But getting paid by city hall-- no-- the taxpayers to endorse programs at the mayor's bidding... That's just a black mark on the name of journalism.
It's one thing to no be objective, but it's a whole new bag when you're just flat out lying to the reader. Making a press release look and feel like news is irresponsible. If they gave out awards for public deception, the Newark city government would be nominated this year, even considering all the "bad news" in the federal government right now.
willemmarx @ October 27, 2005 - 6:03pm
Is this lying or just misrepresentation, if puff pieces about city initiatives are presented as exciting and newsworthy events? If a local newspaper, which - let's be honest about this - might well cover something as humdrum as the opening of a playground on a slow news day, decides to cover more of these kinds of stories than is usual, is this actually lying, or just a rather unexciting change in editorial direction and emphasis?
Clearly it's not an attractive concept, and it's perhaps not very ethical to be doing it in return for payment, but surely it is Newark mayor and city council who should be coming under fire for attempting to control the typically symbiotic and necessarily inter-dependent relationship that exists between politicians and journalists?
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