Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Thomas Lang and Zachary Roth have done some further sleuthing into the Education Department's video news release (VNR) that featured fake "reporter" Karen Ryan and promoted the No Child Left Behind law. "It turns out that the No Child Left Behind VNR, presented as news, ran more widely than we had thought - it's just that it didn't always include Karen Ryan," they write. "A number of local stations ran the VNR as is, and added a local twist by simply having their own reporter read the script. And in an indication of just how confident the Department of Education was that news outlets would fail to adequately scrutinize the content of the VNR, we've also found that it included sound bites in support of the tutoring program from two figures whose appearance in the video might have raised eyebrows had anyone thought to check. ... The stations that took the time to have their own reporters record the script of the No Child Left Behind VNR had to have been fully aware of what they were doing: knowingly deceiving their viewers about the origins of the story - not to mention committing plagiarism - by passing off as their own original reporting words actually written by a PR company hired by the Bush administration."
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