Media Behaving Badly
Category: Local... MSM/Journalism/etc...
Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 at 08:43 AM [GMT-6]

Last week, I did a mental double-take as I was watching an evening news broadcast on our local CBS affiliate. The story was a live report from the Permian Basin Fair in Odessa, and featured an interview with one of the fair's performers, a woman who had an aerial "daredevil" act.

After a couple of questions about the act and her reaction to the crowds at the fair, the interviewer then asked a rather odd question about her hotel accommodations, prefacing the question with something like "I know you're staying at the MCM Elegante, which is owned by the same company as our television station..." That presumably was the cue to let the audience know that we had now shifted from the news -- however soft it had been -- to a blatant commercial for the hotel, and, specifically, the comfort of its beds. It's impossible to know if the interviewee had been coached, but she immediately launched into a gushing endorsement of the accommodations, stating that her husband's back problems were completely nullified by the hotel's bed, etc.

At the time, I was taken aback, but chalked it up to the heat of the moment, a live interview in a relatively non-newsworthy setting. However, the scene was repeated during last night's 10:00 p.m. news broadcast, as a news report that was ostensibly about the world-famous Albuquerque Balloon Festival turned into another infomercial about the MCM hotel in that city, complete with in-room video tours and interviews with the hotel staff extolling the merits of their employer. The KOSA "reporter," Sam Conn, summed up the story by saying that "if you haven't stayed in the MCM, well, you just haven't stayed in a hotel." (Note to the MCM publicist: If you want to distinguish yourself from, say Hotel 6 or Comfort Inn, try keeping the boxy metal wall-mounted HVAC units in your rooms out of camera view.) After the story, the news anchor again issued a disclosure to the effect that both the MCM hotel and CBS-7 were owned by the same company, ICA Properties.

Now, I have no problem with ICA using its media ownership to tout its other assets. ICA president John Bushman already owns half of Odessa and has done his fair share of developing and enhancing the west Texas economy in ways that benefit many of its residents. The fact that the KOSA studios are housed in the Music City Mall (carrying through with the "MCM" theme) which is also owned by ICA should not imply any impropriety; I assume there's a legitimate arms-length business relationship that's mutually beneficial to both entities. On the other hand, when advertising of ICA businesses is seamlessly inserted into news broadcasts, with or without disclosure statements, a line has been crossed in a way that I find offensive.

In my own admittedly subjective scorekeeping, KOSA now has two strikes in this regard. Despite the fact that it otherwise presents one of the most informative and professional news broadcasts in the area, the third strike of this nature will prompt me to switch my news viewing to another station.

And that's the way it is.