CNN hopes its “trustworthiness” will get corporations to pay it to make “news-like content” that will “tell advertisers’ stories.” (CNN screen grab: Daily Buzz)
CNN has announced the formation of a new unit that will not report the news. Instead, it will take money from corporations to produce content that resembles news but is actually PR designed to burnish its clients’ images.
The name CNN gives to this mercenary enterprise? “Courageous.”
It’s hard to see what’s particularly courageous about CNN‘s move, even if you see the destruction of journalistic boundaries as a heroic struggle. As a report about CNN‘s foray into “news-like content on behalf of advertisers” on a Wall Street Journal marketing blog (6/8/15) notes, “news companies from the New York Times to BuzzFeed to the Wall Street Journal have units that create advertiser content.”
Perhaps CNN anticipates courageously withstanding ethical criticism. As the Journal‘s Steven Perlberg notes, “These undertakings often raise church-and-state questions about the divide between the editorial and business sides of a company”—understandably, since the point of so-called native advertising is to create advertising vehicles “that feel like editorial work.”
But CNN‘s parent company insists that this is not about fooling consumers:
“This isn’t about confusing editorial with advertising,” said Dan Riess, executive vice president of integrated marketing and branded content at Turner. “This is about telling advertisers’ stories — telling similar stories but clearly labeling that and differentiating that.”
Mr. Riess said CNN’s trustworthiness when it comes to news was part of the reason Courageous would be attractive to advertisers.
“This is CNN. We’re not here to blur the lines,” he said.
So advertisers will come to Courageous because CNN‘s “trustworthiness” and unwillingness to “blur the lines” will be transfered by viewers to advertising content that is “similar” to CNN‘s news but “clearly label[ed] and differentiat[ed].” This is a business strategy, of course, that only works if the similarity outweighs the differentiation.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Messages to CNN can be sent to here (or via Twitter @CNN). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
“[N]ews-like content”
That pretty much describes the whole of CNN’s product, “branded” or not, don’t you think?
When, 60+ years ago, my mother advised against my “telling stories,” I thought she meant lying. I don’t think she ever imagined that people would some day make careers out of the practice. What a Country!
These people would make a greedy Monkey blush in shame for them, as they have none of their own.
I can see their new ‘catch/buzz LIne’ :”We aren’t confusing Advertisements with News, we are just confused as to what really is news”
Can’t say we didn’t see it coming. TASS must be crying their eyes with jealousy.
Certianly Not News, has a nice ring to it.
Courageous??? Yes!!!! They’ve risked (and possibly lost) their reputation as a high-quality news source.
No thanks CNN, if I wanted fake news I’d watch the Onion. I guess that’s CNN trying to one-up its self as a joke.
Bizvestia.
The only difference between CNN’s news and not-news is that the advertorials at least name their sponsors. One could say that’s one giant leap for corporate journalism.
It’s developments like this that continue to convince me the entire Cold War was really a ploy to sell tax-payer’s on the notion of paying for the cost of maintaining a large standing army to a nation that had in the past always been vehemently opposed to it. When the USSR quietly passed into history circa 1990, catching the CIA, NSA completely by surprise, the Pentagon and then-Bush administration hawks went into a panic, along with nations like Israel that had grown dependent on US military power and the maintenance of a geostrategic balance of power in which the USA felt compelled to both arm and defend Israel, pay it billions yearly along with billions more paid to maintain Egyptian, Saudi, Libyan, Yemeni, Iranian, Iraqi strongmen in power despite being hated by their citizenry in return for maintaining the status quo vis a vis the USSR, US oil sales, and the “Palestinian question”.
However when Bush Sr. realized the USSR would no longer suffice as a threat capable of justifying the trillions spent building US military power, he went to Wolfowitz, Cheney, Gen. Powell, Libby, Bolton, Abrams and and others well known for their hardline Zionist sympathies. So is it any surprise that the USA now has as its new raison d’etre, in this post-cold war era, the very same policy that Likud hardliners have been pushing for 60 years – anti-Arabism ? (long portrayed in the West as “anti-terrorism” by NYTimes owner/editor Sulzberger family, who advanced the cause of Zionism well before WW2). To them it was a natural solution. To the rest of the world it was the beginning of another “cold war” , the war on terrorism where innocents will die merely to keep the powerful in power.
CNN eliminated it’s investigative journalism department in 2012.
One wag noted at tht time that “It’s much cheaper to broadcast speculation and opinion”.