LAST WEEK, News Corp’s newspapers The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Adelaide Advertiser caused controversy by publishing front page “exclusives” and “special reports” alleging that more gas is needed to avoid electricity blackouts in the future.
If readers turned the page and read the fine print, they would learn that this so-called “news” was actually not news. It was an advertorial (a fancy word for an advertisement), paid for by – you guessed it – the fossil fuel industry.
I’m sorry if I’m misunderstanding, I don’t feel that you’ve actually addressed the issue at hand.
Specifically the event where Murdoch papers took payment from the fossil fuel lobby and in return ran front page stories pushing specifically their line that increased natural gas is necessary. This was made technically legal by small print on the next page.
The longstanding convention is that when presented as such a story has been written by a journalist to create the content and not pursue promotion, ‘advertorials’, while problematic in themselves, have always had a note, often small print, directly adjacent to the story.
The event reported here was deliberate misdirection intended to escape the notice of the reader.
The issue isn’t the freedom of the fourth estate, it isn’t even advertising or opinion in the press, it is that it should be clear to the reader what is news, what is opinion and what is advertising. There already exist laws that protect this separation. The Murdoch papers have found a loophole and have deliberately exploited it to deliberately mislead their readers. It is difficult to interpret it any other way and it is this specifically which should be made illegal by clarifying existing laws to close this loophole.
One solution could be to make terms such as ‘news’ or ‘current affairs’ or ‘journalism’ protected terms.
Anybody can claim to be a “nutritionist” but only those with actual recognised qualifications may describe themselves as “dieticians”.
The news media could be given tax breaks under the strict condition they produce only accurate and unbiased journalism.
“Advertorials”, and “puff pieces” would be banned and if a news organisation broke the rules, they would be fined heavily and lose their tax breaks.
Thoughts?
