I’ve always been skeptical of television news. Most of the time, it’s been just a generalized distrust without any real basis in fact or evidence. But over the past couple years, I’ve gotten first-hand knowledge of how easily it is to manipulate television news.
A company I used to work for (which shall remain nameless) has received coverage on somewhere between 75 to 100 TV news outlets, both local and national. MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and CBS all covered us. And I’m sorry to report that the quality of these TV reports has been execrable at best.
We manipulated the TV news, and it was easy. I wrote about this kind of thing in my novel Infoquake, but I didn’t realize how close to the mark I really was.
Here’s how it worked:
1. Sign up a customer in an out-of-the-way city. This wasn’t so much a conscious decision as a reality of the business. Small businesses were much more likely to take a chance on our product than big businesses — especially when they were handed free equipment and given six-month trial periods.
2. Send out a press release to national and local media. The press release would say, in effect, “our new technology x is coming to Walla Walla, Washington — the first use of technology x in this part of Washington state!” Then it would quote statistics of the growing acceptance of our product… due in large part to other customers on six-month trial periods.
3. Provide canned video footage. We hired a videographer to shoot footage of the product being demoed in our own offices and at friendly customer locations nearby. Then we made this video available to news organizations on DVD and via password-protected websites. Almost every station used snippets of this footage without question, and without attribution of any kind. As far as the audience was concerned, this was footage shot by the TV station cameraperson.
4. Stock the customer’s location with our own employees. Few stations relied exclusively on our footage, of course. But when they did bring their own camera crew around to one of our customers to film, we would stock the location with our own employees and their friends. The result: probably 60% of the “customers” talking onscreen about the wonders of technology x were, in fact, company employees.
5. Be flexible with employee titles and positions. Amazingly enough, when the Spanish-language TV stations and print journalists came around to tour our headquarters, all the techs fiddling with the equipment were all Hispanic. And the customers onsite were all Hispanic too.
6. Let the laziness of the TV news team do the rest. Once the national news teams did their pieces, our job was essentially done. Local affiliates would just chop up the same footage and repeat it all over the country. Often they would simply have a local reporter overdub the narration word for word in their own voices. Sometimes the local anchors would literally read the same scripted banter after the segment and crack the same jokes as the national anchors.