News and Advertising, Live at Eleven July 22, 2008

Welcome to newsvertising. Broadcast journalism’s (albeit porous) exalted position as being above the dog-eat-dog world of product marketing has, lamentably, begun to come to an end. For the first time ever, the newsdesk is now fair game for product placement, as the Guardian reports today. McDonalds will now be able to place its Iced Coffees on newsdesks in a product placement deal, which, the article says, extends the “tentacle-like” reach of “clandestine advertising”:

The tentacle-like growth of clandestine advertising in American TV shows in the form of product placement has taken another controversial step with the introduction of McDonald’s products into regional news programmes.

Several TV outlets have begun to sell the fast food giant the right to place cups of its iced coffee onto the desks of news anchors as they present morning current affairs shows.

Typical is Fox 5 News, an affiliate of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox television network in Las Vegas.

Two cups of coffee, their cubes of ice glinting in the studio lights, now daily stand before the channel’s morning presenters. The presenters conspicuously do not drink from the cups, which is just as well – the cups contain a bogus fluid and fake ice to prevent the cubes melting.

Let’s just examine this for a second: McDonalds is paying for their product to be placed in newscasts. Product placement, for anyone who saw the classic early-90s flick “Wayne’s World”, has long been in movies and broadcast television — going so far as “[The] OC, which had one character talk about having “a9.Com’d” a friend on the day the internet search company A9 launched a new Yellow Pages service of that name.”

When was the last time you used a website with a number in its name as a verb? Googling, yes. YouTubing? Perhaps. A9-ing? To even use a term like that in public would be a perfect excuse for any social gathering’s bouncer to say, “Ok, your friends can come in. You, wait outside.”

And if you didn’t know, you better A9 somebody.

“Clandestine advertising” has the power to make characters use outlandish turns of slang, and could be the reason for multiple pizza boxes to be served in a TV show scene depicting dinner for 4. However, when it makes its way onto the newsdesk, the insidious effects are far from humorous. While Adam Bradshaw, news director for Las Vegas’ Fox 5 News, says that he would not put the product on his “5 or 10pm” newsdesk, and that, were a negative story about McDonalds to come up, he would pull the product from the newsdesk. And kudos to Mr. Bradshaw for that. However, as the Guardian notes:

TV stations across America are suffering from a downtown in advertising, partly due to the challenge of the internet and partly to the more recent economic troubles of the country.

In a harsh financial climate, many are turning to new cash streams such as Fox 5 News’s latest innovation.

Many TV stations are turning to new cash streams. Will all of them have the integrity to not put McCoffee on the 5pm news? Will all the journalists accept fake product and pull it off the newsdesk when appropriate, or will some of them let some brand evangelism (”You know, Bob, I love this coffee”) “slip” as part of “casual” banter between anchorpeople?

The fact that we, as Americans, even have to ask these questions says something about the state of our news media. Perhaps “the challenge of the internet” should extend to the newsdesk itself. Perhaps online news has more journalistic integrity due to the sole fact that a banner ad, no matter how well you place it, is still not part of the text one is reading. A commercial for McDonalds when followed by a news report from behind a desk with McDonalds ice cubes twinkling inside of their “new iced coffee”, followed by another commercial for McDonalds, does not give the separation of “this is news, this is advertising”.

When TV stations allow their newsdesks to become prime advertising space, all viewers must take pause — because the more “clandestine” advertising gets, the less the viewer is supposed to perceive it, and the already beleaguered journalistic trade must now try to maintain objective standards in the face of not just politics and ratings, but now also full-on marketing. Remaining fair and balanced is hard when corporate sponsors are keeping you on the airwaves.

But, perhaps, at the end of the day, this is only decor, only a paid accessory — a piece of the desk set aside to cater to a corporate interest.

One can only hope that the news stories themselves aren’t soon to follow.