Power Companies Caught Paying Local News Outlets For Glowing Coverage:
Back in 2016 we noted how U.S. power utilities like Florida Power & Light created entirely fake consumer groups to try and derail legislation that would have brought more competition to market. Six years later and the company has again found itself in the middle of another scandal, this time for buying favorable news coverage from local news outlets across the Southern U.S.
A new investigation by NPR and Floodlight News found that Florida Power & Light and Alabama Power used a company named Matrix LLC to pay numerous Florida and Alabama local news outlets in exchange for favorable local coverage.
It worked: over seven years and for less than a million bucks, local outlets often took advice on stories, softened coverage on demand, targeted political opponents, or ran press releases disguised as news stories on behalf of industry. And it worked because U.S. local news has been so eviscerated there's not a whole lot of ethical guardrails or competent local reporters left in many (especially marginalized) communities:
[...] Nobody's doing much about any of this because nobody wants to do anything about any of this. There's very little actual money to be made in local news and quality reporting (aside from hedge funds buying the stumbling corpses of local papers then stripping them for parts).
So instead of doing things like shoring up media regulatory oversight, trying to find creative new funding sources, or developing firewalled public funding options for local reporting, in many instances we've just ceded the entire local news industry to charlatans.
Charlatans that are producing something that resembles local news, but is really just propaganda for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. And despite the fact that researchers have shown this erosion has left us less informed and more divided than ever — and in many instances sways close elections against the public interest — very little has been done to change the trajectory we're on.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Friday January 13, @08:56AM (19 children)
Corporations engage in spin and deceit to get people to do what's good for them and against the interest of the people.
Next you're gonna tell us they do this online, too? With shills posting on message boards and social media? Well, hold the presses... oh wait...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 13, @10:34AM
Exactly. Oil industry, defense industry, home building industry, trucking industry, etc ad nauseum. Anyone who works for a corporation anywhere, can point to public relations efforts, ranging from sponsoring 4th of July picnics, to news stories casting the corp in a good light. In fact, they'll stage an event, invite a "reporter", and write the story for the reporter. Nonprofits do the same, and politicians. Megachurches. Who and what else?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 13, @11:26AM (7 children)
Isn't this called false advertising? Putting out press releases with misleading or false information for the purposes of influencing government should be a notch or two above lying directly to consumers.
Transparency is always the answer.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Touché) by darkpixel on Friday January 13, @02:22PM (1 child)
Sometimes. But usually it's called "marketing".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 13, @02:49PM
I mean, the press release is a time honored tradition in the industry, companies subscribe to AP newswire (so they can read the articles, yeah... right) and those subscribers can also submit stories for consideration for publication, for a "nominal" several thousand dollar review fee - stories get run, people get informed... advertising, without looking like advertising.
Our local news station even would come by and shoot "local interest" segments about our business for free, when they felt like it... probably didn't hurt that our offices were across the street from their news studio.
But... it's getting to the stage where videos and print stories should have some kind of banner disclosing where they are coming from: independent investigative journalism, mildly compensated reviews, heavily compensated stories and coverage, political funding...
Wouldn't it be nice to see when you donate to your political candidate or party, where that money really goes? When you pay your power bill, how much of that bill is being plowed back into lobbying the legislature to protect their monopoly? And where, specifically can you see the results of those advertising and lobbying spends?
I mean, lobbying is fair game, but lobbying behind closed doors should be making its way towards treason level penalties, and outright deceit of government for commercial purposes maybe should identify the individuals responsible and try them with penalties similar to enemy espionage agents.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 13, @04:38PM (4 children)
Isn't this called false advertising?
The first amendment gives us the right to lie like Trumps. That's why only a competitor can sue for false advertising (I agree, it's illogical and immoral), making it trouble-free for a monopoly to lie its ass off.
In more civilized, less Fascist nations (e.g., Britain or damned near anywhere else) it's perfectly legal for the government to outlaw false advertising. Not here.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 13, @05:35PM (2 children)
In Florida Real Estate, embellishment is permitted in advertising, but not outright lies. So: "Beautiful Ocean Views" can be applied to an apartment 10 miles from the beach facing away from the ocean, but only if you can look into the window of another apartment and see a reflection that has some hint of piece of a view of the ocean, if only on the clearest of days. Maybe today you could even apply that to a basement apartment with no windows but they have a TV and internet connection that can stream a webcam from a beach somewhere.
But, even in Florida Real Estate, advertisements placed by licensed sales people or brokers must clearly include the identity of the brokerage agency placing the ad. They baked that much transparency into the real estate advertising laws over 50 years ago now.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 14, @08:36PM (1 child)
What's true in real estate isn't necessarily true in auto sales, or real estate in another location. But the chances are the fine for breaking the law is a lot cheaper than litigating all the way to the US Supreme Court. They only care about the bottom line, pay the cheap fine and if it's more lucrative than truthfulness, you pay the fine and keep lying.
Just because they take away your neighbor's shotgun doesn't mean you have no second amendment rights, it just means he couldn't afford to defend his.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 14, @11:18PM
Again, Florida Real Estate law requiring identity of the advertiser goes back 50 years, the fines are steep enough to encourage compliance (besides, what does an honest broker have to gain with anonymous advertising?). There are enough troublemaker lawyers in Florida that if there were a case to be won in the Supreme Court they would have at least tried by now.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 14, @11:23PM
Or a customer [classlawgroup.com].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13, @02:18PM (3 children)
Ultimately it is up to us to immunize ourselves against this corruption. Call it out, report on it. Once it gets so bad that we don't hear about it, or worse people "disappear", which is not far-fetched, then welcome to fascism.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday January 13, @04:30PM (2 children)
Why bother? The demographics are BRUTAL and essentially everyone with gray hair STILL watches local TV news and newspaper percentages of people below 50 or so still watch legacy TV news. Its got demographics that look like pro baseball TV viewers LOL.
There's no need for disappearing people and stuff like that if nobody is watching in 20 years.
Younger people, or people younger than gray hair, get their local news from propaganda bots on the censored internet and don't care at all about legacy TV news.
The only people still watching legacy TV in 2023 remember watching black and white TVs, or TV before stereo sound, or at least TVs before ATSC/HDTV.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 13, @04:41PM
I see you've possibly reached drinking age. You have a lot to learn.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 13, @06:46PM
>There's no need for disappearing people and stuff like that
There's ALWAYS a need for disappearing people, people falling out high windows, and stuff like that. What you hope is that the trouble that people get into for participating in such things is sufficient to discourage them from ever even thinking about actually doing it.
If we don't even bother to call out the bad actors when they're acting badly, the bad actors become the Norm. Nobody wants bad actors sitting next to Cliffy the mailman.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 13, @04:32PM (5 children)
Yes, bribing a politician is a felony and will get you and the politician thrown in prison ala Ryan, Blago, and soon, Madigan. However, it's safe and legal for one amoral corporation to bribe another amoral corporation to convince voters to vote for the politician they would have otherwise bribed.
Not much of an improvement if you ask me. It doesn't matter anyway, the US has been a plutocracy since Citizens United and possibly since its inception.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 13, @06:50PM (4 children)
The US has been a plutocracy / oligarchy since inception, however... it seems like the generation that came back from fighting WWII was thrown several bones resembling "fair and level playing field" - possibly because a lot of vets got themselves elected into Congress and other positions of power and felt more obligation to help their buddies from the war than to line their own pockets, for once in our history.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 14, @08:52PM (3 children)
No, it was the Great Depression. In the 1920s the rich, the stockbrokers, the bankers were almost demigods. Before WWII the lowest tax bracket was over four times the median income. From the 1920s through the 1950s were as much a time of liberalism as the 1900s through the 1920s were rampant greed, like the rich today.
Even the unemployed have a vote, and when one in four workers are out of work, only a liberal has any chance of being re-elected. In boom times everyone becomes a conservative.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 14, @11:21PM
I suppose the difference between 1925 and 1955 wasn't the ideals, it was the actual wealth available to share.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 14, @11:44PM (1 child)
JoeMerchant got this right. The greed has been there all along through good and bad.
And is this alternate history week? Between this and your journal [soylentnews.org], you have a bunch of claims about the past that just aren't true. The 1930s were very illiberal with a variety of state-enforced oligopolies, gold seizures, tariff wars, and the various anti-Democratic shenanigans that FDR pulled (like threatening to stack the Supreme Court when they didn't decide his way). We still suffer a lot of fallout from that time, such as weird agricultural regulation and subsidies.
Since I mentioned your journal, the three that are particularly wrong are: indexing minimum wage to McDonald's burgers, claiming that "the rich" are using racism to keep the US separated while ignoring that racism is substantially reduced now compared to those great times of 1950s and 1960s, and pining for a 95% marginal tax rate that almost never happened due to loop holes in tax law (see figures 2 and 3 here [mises.org], the rich are paying nearly constant fraction over the time span 1950-2014).
My take is that the Great Depression was an unusually severe recession followed by the economic disaster of FDR's administration. And the big difference between now and the 1950s/1960s is labor competition from the developing world.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 14, @11:46PM
Already correcting myself: and the enormous cost increase of real estate and health care. I think those three effects almost fully explain everything including what you've mentioned so far.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 13, @01:07PM (3 children)
This sort of crap is exhibit A in why copyright does not work and why we need a new system. Local news moving online was a good money saver, but that doesn't help with income. Publishers resorted to various foolish underhanded tactics to stay in business, and of course it didn't work. 2 decades ago, most print publications jumped onto the then new fad of not allowing subscriptions to expire. Changed their model from opt-in to opt-out. There was no option that did not include the hated auto-renewal. I cancelled every one of them that tried that on us, and eventually, when it seemed all of them were doing it, I cancelled them all. No surprise that their next move was to start degrading into propaganda outlets. All the more reason to quit them.
They should have been working on some kind of grand bargain in which they receive patronage from the communities they serve. A minor part of that would be to allow local libraries to shoulder the burden of hosting their old content online. Most now understand that 50 year old articles are not worth much, but a few still persist in sitting on those as if there might be a few hidden gems in them. Occasionally they take a swipe at piracy, wailing for lawmakers to do more to help them on that front, as if the law can.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 13, @01:54PM (2 children)
Transparency is always the answer.
Any money or other "good and valuable consideration" publishers and/or authors receive from and entity they may distribute "news, reviews or editorial comments" about should be disclosed within 24 hours of receipt of funds and/or linked to a cross indexed report for each publication.
Yes, when I receive free goodies in exchange for writing a review, that review should include a link to a standard accounting form disclosing not only that I received this one freebie for the review, but also all related freebies I have received under this and any similar programs. As a reader of product reviews, I would weight the reviews of people who paid for the product differently from those who got the product for free and different still from reviewers who receive hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free products for review every year.
Similarly, when a "news outlet" receives millions of dollars per year from the power generation industry, in any form, that should be prominently disclosed in conjunction with any "news" they publish related to the power generation industry in any way. That disclosure should be sufficiently detailed and historically complete to reveal any possibility of "pay for play" in the news.
In the days of print and broadcast there may not have been sufficient bandwidth for this type of disclosure (though I might argue that some percentage of that limited bandwidth which was devoted to advertising could easily have been devoted to disclosure, particularly in the less popular sections of the paper and timeslots of broadcast). Today, with robots stealing all our jobs, humans can spend more time and effort keeping each other honest, unless you would prefer the robots to do that too?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13, @02:29PM
It's a good idea. Making the playing field level for news must include declaring income sources (or contributed "articles"). In should in fact be regarded as taxable income for the news outlet AND declared. And while we're here... let's talk about our public representatives. Come on, man. Let's quadruple the salaries and INSIST no other jobs. You do the people's work. Our present system is only putting millionaires in power with terrible conflicts of interest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13, @09:02PM
But sometimes it's not about the money [npr.org] . . .
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Friday January 13, @04:34PM
The article is freaking out about the baseline moving up from 0% to 100%. Reality is more like paid commercial content is increasing from 20% to 21%, no big deal.
They're still going to have shitty McDonalds commercials for five minutes of every hour, its just the news might publish a "story" that a new McD is opening down the road "because people want to know" or whatever.
It goes the other way too. Remember when all the news media types jumped on Toyota for "unintended acceleration" which was just a smokescreen for not buying enough advertising spots?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday January 13, @07:39PM (2 children)
The only surprising parts here are they got caught, and that anyone cared.
News has always had some level of advertising baked in. But things are getting worse as everyone gets used to being increasingly bombarded by seizure inducing function-blocking advertisements at every turn.
I remember when iPhones first came on the market, all the news outlets had reporters proudly doing their field reports via grainy, laggy iPhone video. It was stupid. Why do you think they did it?
Or when the industry was trying to push touch screen monitors. No more easily readable green-screen and hardly-noticeable presentation remote, now the presenters had to turn around, show the world their butts, fiddle with touch controls, all while everyone can see a clear reflection of the studio - or the presenters butt again while facing the audience - in the mega-glare screen. No one wanted to see Russ Spencer's butt, but they kept doing it anyway.
Oh, then every time someone posted something on Twatter(R)(TM) or Facefook(R)(TM), they called it out by name. But any other site was "they posted on social media", and every on screen title featured the twitter logo with "follow such and such reporter on Tweeter(R)(TM)". Fortunately that kind of slacked off after the capital riots.
Then the pandemic brought an increase in the "steals and deals" type sections, which were already just advertisements.
So, no surprise here.....
And don't forget to download our FREE weather/news/malware app and buy a new smart phone to run it! All praise smart phones and their kickback dollars!
[Insert seizure inducing full motion video advertisement here]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 14, @12:34AM
BLARG... oh look, I just created content!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 14, @07:37AM
I'd hazard that every corporation big enough to cross state lines does the same whenever they see a need. After all, why waste resources on a Public Relations department when the news media costs no more and has much wider reach?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.