Read CMD's charges about
"Nelson's Rescue Sleep"

If you watched a Comcast CN8 show called "Art Fennell Reports" a little over a year ago, you may have seen a feature about "non-prescription sleep aids." Actually, the program focused on only one such product: "Nelson's Rescue Sleep," and included the comment that "If you are one of the estimated 70 million Americans who have trouble sleeping - Rescue Sleep may be what you're looking for."

What Comcast did not tell its viewers, the Federal Communications Commission charged today, is that Comcast based much of that feature on a Video News Release (VNR) commissioned by Nelson's Rescue Sleep. The cost of the omission: $4,000, the FCC declared.

"Commission rules are clear: viewers have a right to know who is trying to persuade them so they can make up their own minds about what they are presented," Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said in a press statement released right after the decision.

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.

An alliance of Video News Release [VNR] groups has fired off a second rebuttal to the Center for Media and Democracy's [CMD] campaign against undisclosed "fake news" sponsorship. A public filing from the National Association of Broadcast Communicators [NABC] objects to efforts by CMD to "manipulate and distort the [Federal Communications] Commission's sponsorship identification requirements," as the lobby puts it.

NABC claims that FCC rules do not state that all VNRs must disclose their sponsor. They also argue that producers have no connection to the way in which a VNR is broadcast, therefore they are exempt from disclosing information about their revenue.

The headlines have more or less vanished since the scandal over "fake news" first surfaced about six months ago, but behind the scenes producers of Video News Releases (VNRs) are mobilizing to get the Federal Communications Commission to slow down its investigation of the controversial format.

Quick recap: In August the FCC announced that it had sent out letters to 77 TV stations asking them whether they broadcast "fake news"—ad company Video News Releases (VNR) made to look like real news features.

The Federal Communications Commission announced today that it has sent out letters to 77 TV stations asking them whether they broadcast "fake news"—ad company Video News Releases (VNR) made to look like real features.

"The public is misled by individuals who present themselves to be independent, unbiased experts or reporters, but are actually shills promoting a prepackaged corporate agenda." FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said in praise of the move.

The law states that broadcasters can air such pieces, usually produced and distributed by public relations firms, but they have to disclose the origin of the program to their viewers.

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein has called for the curtailing of "fake news"—the practice of including undisclosed corporate video news releases (VNRs) in television newscasts.

"It has gotten to the point that it’s often impossible for viewers to tell the difference between news and propaganda," Adelstein told reporters in a press conference on Friday, April 8.

Adelstein's remarks come in response to a report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) suggesting that the practice of using surreptitious VNRs has become widespread.

The CMD study says that 77 television stations, reaching more than half the U.S. population, have aired VNRs without revealing to viewers the true origins of the material.