Thoughts on the Advertising Clash with the Newsroom.

Chalisa Magpanthong
cm204403@ohio.edu

Clashes between the broadcast stations’ advertising and sales departments on stories covering important advertisers are as old as the history of commercial broadcasting. I have heard about incidents in which pressure was applied to assignment editors or news directors to pull or temper stories about major clients that took place decades ago. However, it seems that reports of these events have grown more frequent in recent years.

It has to be recognized that conflicts between a station’s desire to cover news in its local community well and its effort to look after the interests of its advertisers are bound to occur. Inevitably, embarrassing or potentially harmful stories will arise that concern a broadcaster’s advertising clients and the decision to run such stories can either affect its bottom line or its standing in the community, or if mishandled, both.

The solution is most often reporting on the story in a nuanced way that maintains the essential elements of its details, but presents the story in a way that sheds as little negative light as possible on the client. This allows the news department to maintain its fundamental integrity while offering some help to its advertiser. Of course, this is not a complete solution as an approach like this involves framing the story in a way that is distorted by the client’s wish to be protected.

What makes these incidents more common today? Perhaps there are several factors at play. First, we are in dire economic times and advertising revenues in the past six months have declined precipitously nearly everywhere in the US. This makes station management doubly nervous about stories that might affect their advertisers, and so more than usual pressure might be applied to managers in the news department.

Secondly, and more importantly, the nature of news on radio and television has experienced a fundamental change within the past decade. While the public still lists local television as the number one source of news, people also use multiple sources, and use all sources less than they used to. This has led broadcasting stations to see their news programs as less of a civic responsibility and more of yet another opportunity to deliver entertainment to audiences. Thus, local newscasts tend to be constructed around stories that have high excitement value but may have little substance. In this environment, omission of stories that might affect advertisers hardly matters because the obligation to serve public information needs has been greatly diminished.

I found a report on a very interesting study of the influence of media ownership and advertisers on network television news correspondents. The findings reported that about 20% of the correspondents felt some ownership pressure to report or censor stories and 7% reported some advertiser pressure.*

* Price, C. J. (2003). Interfering owners or meddling advertisers: How network television news correspondents feel about ownership and advertiser influence on news stories. Journal of Media Economics, 16 (3), 175-188.