Tuesday, December 13, 2005
WIBA sells name of its newsroom to a business:Story: (excerpts, emp add) Beginning Jan. 1, the WIBA newsroom will be called the Amcore Bank News Center.
"This simply means they get 'name branding' with the description of the news center on air," confirmed Jeff Tyler, vice president of Clear Channel Radio-Madison, which owns WIBA-AM 1310 and FM 101.5. "What listeners will hear on air is something like, 'Now from the Amcore Bank News Center, here's WIBA's Jennifer Miller.'"
Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics trainer for the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., opposed the plan. "The idea is that a newsroom is an advocate for the public," McBride said. "It's Madison's news, not Amcore's news. If you have corporate branding, that is going to taint the whole product as a marketing product."
But James Baughman, professor and director of UW- Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said he's not disturbed by the sale. He said it's a return to broadcast practices of the 1950s, a topic he's exploring for his next book.
"From 1948 to 1956 the NBC nightly news was the Camel News Caravan," said Baughman. The name was tied to a cigarette manufacturer. "They even had a rule that they would not show a cigar or a 'no smoking' sign on air, although they made an exception for Winston Churchill."
Baughman said naming rights are part of a broader media trend. "Clear Channel is trying to maximize its profits. Advertisers are trying to find new ways of getting their brand out there. We're going to be seeing more of this."
And Tyler said the high cost of producing quality news necessitates such an arrangement. Baughman's citation of Camel cigarettes makes exactly the point: That explicit corporate ties to the news will affect what is broadcast. And a professor of journalism isn't disturbed by that? And as to having to do it in order to produce "quality news" - they've got a property (radio frequency) from the government in exchange for serving the public interest. That (broadcasting quality news) is a cost of having the monopoly, and should not be treated like any other entertainment programming.
posted by Quiddity at 12/13/2005 01:05:00 PM
3 comments
Spare me the outrage.
News bias affects all news outlets, whether they are commercially supported, or so-called "not for profits."
I listen to NPR occasionally, and I can often tell who paid for the news broadcast by the stories they choose to broadcast. Case in point -- a while back the local NPR newscast had a story about a seizure of marijuana in Chicago. Not even that much, a couple of kilos. NPR news never covers the police beat, so the little isolated blurb was completely incongruous. About 10 minutes later the announcer mentioned that today's broadcast was paid for by the ONDCP (Office of National Drug Control Policy), which made everything clear.
ALL NEWS IS BIASED. Whoever pays the bills picks the content; either explicitly or implicitly. If your sponsor is Camel, then you can't show a cigar. If your primary sponsor is the Pew Cheritable Trusts or the MacArthur Foundation, then you'd better make room in the newscast for stories about abuses by U.S. soldiers, hatred of the United States by Muslims, the Iraq body count and positive coverage of whatever public figure is most effectively bashing Bush at the moment. Otherwise, before long you will be looking for a new primary sponsor to pay your next paycheck. If you're Fox, you have your sponsors too. And your obligations.
The question is always, who are your sponsors and what do they want?" If a news broadcast has a lot of drug commercials, don't expect to find hard-hitting exposes of drug company scandals. Chicago news broadcasts are heavily dependant on automobile advertising, and when the auto show comes to town they give it more "news" coverage than they give to local elections.
Please lose the fantasy that there's some sort of mythical "unbiased" news broadcasting out there that is in danger of being corrupted by advertising. The people who write and deliver the news have to continually think about the wishes of the people who pay for the news. And even if you were to achieve the goal of eliminating advertising pressure from the news broadcast, there's still the biases of the people who write and deliver the news. And as Dan Rather proved, writing the news is power, and power corrupts.
Mainstream media news broadcasting is about selling product. The product is your eyes and ears, and the customer is the advertiser, be he a soap manufacturer or a liberal or conservative think tank. Thus it has always been, and always will be.
Next step: church sponsorship of news. "Live, from the Jesus Christ newsroom, ten thousand puppies killed by lightning!"
I live in Madison, home of WIBA. WIBA has an illustrious past, having been started by the Capital Times newspaper, who took the lead in exposing Joe McCarthy. They had, for many years, the only local radio news worth listening to in Madison. Alas, they are now part of Clear Channel, who is a complete toady for corporate America. Their news is neither local or worth listening too anymore. Too bad.
It is interesting to note that NBC's news channel is MSNBC. The MS part is MicroSoft. NBC had been an unidentified shill for GE, the owner for many years. They just didn't say so up front by naming their news operation GENBC...
AmCore (Based in Rockford, IL) has not been particularly political and seems to be doing this for the name recognition, rather than pushing an agenda, unlike GE. Remember Jack Welch storming the NBC newsroom in 2000 and demanding that the election be called for Bush?
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