The president of a company that makes Video News Releases (VNRs) has filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission describing an organization critical of his products as a "radically left wing anti-corporate group."

"The Center for Media and Democracy [CMD] continues to fallaciously charge that what we do is somehow dishonest and that stations airing our content are violating our rules," Kevin Foley, President of KEF Media Associates, Inc., e-mailed FCC Chair Kevin Martin in mid-December. "Neither accusation is true."

Foley cc'd the e-mail to Republican Commissioners Robert M. McDowell and Deborah Taylor Tate, but not to either of the agency's two Democrats: Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps. The Commission accepted and publicly filed the comment on January 9th of this year.

For almost ten months the CMD has run a spirited campaign against the undisclosed broadcasting of VNRs, which the group calls "fake news."

Such releases, made to look like news features, often extol the virtues of some commercial product. In April of 2006 the CMD issued a study indicating that dozens of TV news stations have run VNRs without revealing that they are produced not by independent journalists, but by ad agencies.

The Center's report on the practice described, among many examples, an October 2005 two minute segment aired by KTVI-2 in St.Louis, Missouri, on keeping children safe during Halloween. The feature included product placement shots of Snickers, M&Ms and Halloween bouquets produced by 1-800-FLOWERS.

According to the CMD report, what KTVI-2 did not tell viewers was that Masterfoods, the makers of Snickers, and 1-800-FLOWERS paid a media company to produce the story.

The FCC is now investigating these reports. But a lobbying group to which KEF Media belongs, the National Association of Broadcast Communicators (NABC), defends this practice on a legal technicality—the Commission's rules, NABC claims, don't require sponsorship identification of all VNRs; only those that deal with controversial issues of public importance, politics, or when the VNR maker has paid the station to run the program.

What appears to have gotten Foley's goat is that the CMD issued a jocular press release on December 18, 2006, awarding the NABC the "Silver Falsie" award, along with another group defending VNRs, the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA).

The RTNDA recently filed comments with the agency insisting that the FCC's investigation of VNRs has had "a chilling effect on the dissemination of newsworthy information to the public."

"Funny," CMD's 'Falsie' press release declared, "but we didn't notice any chill while compiling our follow-up report, 'Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs.' Of the 140 VNR broadcasts documented between the two reports, TV stations offered clear disclosure of the videos' nature and source only twice. There's something very wrong with this picture."

This apparently was too much for Foley, who included the "Silver Falsie" press release at the bottom of his e-mail.

"It appears this radically left wing anti-corporate group is enjoying themselves (see below) at the expense of companies like mine and, indirectly, the Commission, which the CMD believes it has 'won over' on this matter," Foley wrote. "Companies like mine perform a perfectly legal and useful service, disseminating to TV newscasters information from America's corporations, not-for-profits, charities, associations, the U.S. government, including the armed services, and many other groups."

The FCC has yet to issue any formal decision on the controversy. But in November of last year, after the CMD's follow-up report, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein released a statement on the issue.

"Some stations have developed such an ingrained pattern of running VNRs that even a direct investigation by the FCC isn't enough to snap them out of it," Adelstein said on November 14th.

"Maybe some have run so many red lights it seems like the normal way to drive. It’s time to start handing out citations."

NABC and RTNDA did not win top prize from the CMD. The organization's "Golden Falsie" went to ABC for their six hour docudrama on the September 11th attacks. The program placed considerable blame for the disaster on the Clinton administration.