Fake news

[Tags: interactive pr, pr]. The Media Guardian reports on the rise of the fake news report - essentially a video press release that is broadcast by news organisations without any attribution: "Video News Releases, or VNRs, corporate propaganda designed to look like legitimate news". It shouldn't come as any surprise that, just as lazy and time-starved journalists will reprint press releases verbatim, lazy and time-starved TV news operations are doing the same with VNRs. This seems to me like a very bad idea for PR agencies, and one that will ultimately blow up in their faces much as the fake blogs and YouTube videos have.