CNN’s ‘Courageous’ Advertorial Mill

CNN’s ‘Courageous’ Advertorial Mill
By Jim Naureckas
Jun 08 2015

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.”

More:
http://fair.org/home/cnns-courageous-advertorial-mill/