I’m a skeptic when it comes to electric cars. I also try to follow business news. Lately, I’ve begun to notice something. It’s not hard to find articles praising Tesla Motors, and declaring them to be the next big thing and you should buy them Now ! Now! NOW! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, GO BUY THEM GODDAMMIT!!!. OK, i’m exaggerating, but you get the idea. There are articles that sound a more cautous note, but they’re a small minority. Now, I’m not trying to start another thread about the pros and cons of electric cars, so I’ll get to the heart of my question:
I’m beginning to wonder if some (or perhaps most) of these articles are in fact paid advertisements. Your typical business article always has a disclaimer that says something like, “Joe Schmoe does not own any stock in any of the copmpanies mentioned in this article.” I have never, however, seen a disclaimer that says, “Joe Schmoe has not received any form of compensation from any of the companies mentioned in this article.” So, do business writers ever get paid to promote specific companies? Do any laws or ethics rules cover such behavior?
First, any sort of compensation is highly unethical and may be illegal depending on the circumstances. Of course it happens. People do unethical and illegal things all the time. Direct compensation is probably not a huge issue overall, though.
What does happen all the time is that lazy magazines and newspapers and online cites print press releases lightly disguised as articles. My guess is that the vast majority of the items you see in any upcoming product report are simply press releases. Same for restaurants or stores that are going to open.
This is not, strictly speaking, unethical. Reporters literally can’t do individual investigations of products that haven’t been released. Even after release, evaluations are hard, costly, and time-consuming, especially considering the volume of products flooding the market. Consumer Reports does everything properly and aboveboard but if you check their reviews very closely, many products are no longer available by the time the article comes out. Who wants to wait that long only to find out that you have to start all over again?
Another side of the issue is slanting articles to keep on the good side of companies that advertise in the publication. This is an age-old problem. A hundred years ago critics complained that you would never read a newspaper article about anything bad that happened in any department store because department stores were the biggest advertisers in newspapers. Some publications try to keep rigorous separation between the news division and the advertising and business side but news is always fighting an uphill battle. Good news sells better than bad news when it comes to products. And reporters will always write nicer articles about companies that go out of their way to coddle them than of companies who are secretive and defensive.
Whether any of this applies to any individual product is hard to say. Some products are pretty good, after all, and deserve to be praised. It’s next to impossible to sit in a Tesla and fight the urge to scream out I WANT ONE. Would I buy one? Not unless a whole lot of things changed, little things like price, availability, service, longevity, ability to charge, battery life… But if those basics didn’t apply to you, then why not praise the car? And I bet that most of those negatives are buried in the positive articles and you’re selectively ignoring them because they aren’t being emphasized. Buyer beware.
Sometimes you’ll see sections of some newspapers or magazines that are marked as paid advertisements, but they are formatted to look like articles. For example, Inc. magazine has a “Special Advertising Section” almost every month from one franchise or another. If you miss the heading at the top, you might forget that it’s paid and not part of the magazine’s content.
Most publications tag this content in a similar way that sets it apart from their other reviews and news that are written internally. Even on TV, infomercials start with a disclaimer that the content and opinions are not those of the station.
But you can certainly “buy” press in more subtle ways. Tell reporters about your grand opening or press event, liquor them up at the open bar, and tell them what you want them to report. You have no guarantees that they’ll report anything, or that it will be positive, but it’s a pretty safe bet you’ll get something out of it. Half the work in getting good press is making sure the reporters know about you.
Some reviewers are compensated by being able to keep the promotional products they’ve tested. That’s probably not the case with Tesla, though.
A possibly-related issue is what you might call “Wiki advertizing.” Many Wikipedia articles for companies read like something that might have come out of a PR department. And indeed, if you read the discussion page for these articles, someone will usually lay the claim that the article “sounds like a press release.”
Again, it makes me wonder if some companies assign a low-level grunt in the Advertizing Department to check Wikipedia and “tweak” their wiki page.
Having spent more than 25 years in public relations I can tell you that we don’t do anything as crass as pay reporters to write nice things about us. (Not mainstream media anyway, I’ve never dealt with the blogosphere.)
That does not stop us from bombarding said reporters with news releases talking about all the good stuff our product does, setting up interviews with usually inacessible company executives that reporters normally have to jump through hoops for, arranging to get them cars for week-long test drives, getting them information that we won’t tell the general public for weeks or even months, setting up press events that include all of the above plus good food and an open bar and overall doing everything we can to make it easy to say nice things about us.
I used to publish a trade paper. Our good news was definitely for sale. Buy enough advertising and we’d print anything you wanted. But there was no mistaking our content for objective journalism. I will note that no company ever asked us to publish more than a press release or reprint an article about them. But in any media outlet advertising will affect editorial policy, though not necessarily to the degree that they’d compromise their integrity.
And then the articles get fixed, and possibly deleted entirely, making one wonder what the point was. Probably to line the pockets of a digital media expert or similar who claimed to be able to SEO them into the top spot on Google. SEOs are scum.
I’ve heard there are companies that work to turn around bad press after public debacles. I guess that would fall under PR, but I’m a little bothered by what I’m seeing in one example.
There’s a businessman I used to know who eventually committed some sort of fraud. Now when you Google his name all sorts of links come up that have descriptions like:
*
“Fred Fraudster is a well-educated and experienced entrepreneur …”
“Fred Fraudster is a leading entrepreneur and lifelong humanitarian based in Such and Such, USA.”
“Fred Fraudster is an enthusiast keenly interested in philanthropic and humanitarian deeds. He established an organization called Fred Fraudster Foundation …”*
These appear in Google search results and could appear to be legitimate links, but I’m sure are actually PR firm “articles”. Actual news pieces about him are of a different tone entirely.
The nature of my business is such that “Do you do SEO?” is a question that comes up in the first ten minutes of most discussions. My reply is to lean close to the client and in a conspiratorial voice, say, “95% of what’s called SEO is… voodoo. I do the *other *5% as an integral part of the job, just like any competent web architect.”
Yes, that’d be a violation of the most basic ethics rules in any kind of objective journalism. The disclaimers you’re talking are there to assure you that you’re getting an independent and reliable report. They’re not there to create a loophole (“We were telling the truth that Joe doesn’t own stock - we didn’t say anything about not being paid $100,000 to write a good review!”) Journalists are often attracted to anything new and shiny and they’re not being paid to predict the future, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a disproportionate amount of press for groundbreaking future technologies that may or may not pan out. There have been plenty of stories about potential cures for heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer’s that looked promising but were only beginning to be tested and then didn’t pan out. To some extent this is just a bias inherent in the idea of news: stuff that is new and exciting is going to get attention, and sometimes it will get more attention than it deserves. But it’s probably not because the reporters are getting paid to write nice things about the companies. A reporter or editor who did this would lose his or her job and have to find a new line of work.
An incredibly sleazy practice. I think there are infomercials like this, too.
Reporters definitely love nothing more than free food and drinks. But free food and a lavish gala is pretty far down the scale from payments in return for a good review or good press.
Well, Google searches aren’t particularly discriminating. As a PR person, I can be sending out news releases all over the place calling Fred a humanitarian (no guarantee that anyone will publish them), I can call Fred a humanitarian on his and my Facebook pages, on his profile page on the company website, in the biographies of Fred that appear in sites for the charitable organizations he’s donated a ton of money to, etc. etc.
I can even pay firms like Business Wire or PR Newswire (whose roles are specifically to distrubte news releases) for spreading the word about Fred’s philanthropy. But that’s a far cry from paying a reporter under the table to sign his/her name to an article calling Fred a humanitarian.
It doesn’t have to be all that lavish. The “grand opening” for my office cost me about $80. We invited clients, the chamber of commerce and the local newspapers. We got a brief mention buried where I’m sure no one will read it, but accounting firms are not exactly front-page stuff unless they screw up.