The segment runs ninety seconds. There is a reporter's voice, b-roll of a factory floor or a doctor's office, a satisfied customer, an expert in a white coat, and a tidy sign-off. It looks exactly like the story that ran before it and exactly like the story that runs after it. It was made by a PR firm. The client paid for it. The station paid nothing, aired it, and never told you whose ninety seconds you just watched. That's a video news release — a VNR — and for a stretch in the 2000s researchers went and counted how often it was happening. The numbers are the reason this guide exists. * **What a VNR actually is** * A video news release is a complete, ready-to-air news segment produced by a broadcast PR company, a corporate communications department, or a government agency. It usually ships as a package: the finished narrated piece for stations that want to run it as-is, plus raw b-roll and soundbites for stations that want to rebuild it with their own anchor reading the script. The Center for Media and Democracy, which spent years tracking them, describes VNRs as segments that look and sound like independently gathered reports but exist to promote the products, services, image or point of view of whoever funded them. That's the design goal, stated plainly: indistinguishable from journalism. Not similar to. Indistinguishable. And there is nothing inherently illegal about making one. PR firms are allowed to make videos. The question every VNR turns on is whether the station tells you where it came from. * **The counting: 77 stations, 36 VNRs, zero disclosures** * On April 6, 2006, the Center for Media and Democracy published "Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed." Researchers tracked 36 VNRs over ten months and identified **77 television stations** that aired at least one of them. The clients behind those segments included Pfizer, Intel and General Motors. According to the report, not once was the funder disclosed to the audience. Then they did it again, to see whether being named publicly had changed anything. "Still Not the News," by Diane Farsetta and Daniel Price, came out on November 14, 2006 and covered April through October of that year: **46 stations in 22 states** aired **33 different VNRs a total of 54 times**. Of those 54 broadcasts, **48 carried no disclosure at all** of the sponsored video's nature or source. In the remaining six, the disclosure was fleeting or ambiguous. The most damning line in the whole exercise is the repeat-offender count. Ten of the stations caught in the second study had already been named in the first one, seven months earlier. Of those ten, exactly **two** — KYW-3 in Philadelphia and WCPO-9 in Cincinnati — disclosed the second time around. * **When the government made one: "I'm Karen Ryan reporting"** * The case that turned VNRs into a Washington scandal wasn't corporate. It was federal. In 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services distributed video news releases promoting the new Medicare prescription-drug law. They ended with a sign-off from a reporter named Karen Ryan. Karen Ryan was a public relations consultant, paid through a contractor with federal money. Nothing in the package said so. The GAO — Congress's own auditor — ruled in opinion B-302710 that this violated the prohibition on using appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda. Its reasoning is the sentence worth memorizing: the package was developed with taxpayer money but was built to appear to be an independent news story, and the failure to identify HHS *inside the story package* was not cured by identifying it somewhere in the accompanying materials. Meaning: the disclosure has to reach the person watching. A source line buried in a press kit that only the station's assignment desk ever sees is not disclosure. It's paperwork. In 2005 the GAO extended the principle: any government-produced or government-funded VNR that doesn't make its source clear to the audience is illegal covert propaganda. It doesn't reach private-sector VNRs at all — Pfizer is not spending appropriated funds. And then the part that tells you how Washington actually works. The Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget rejected the GAO's reading, taking the position that government VNRs are permissible so long as they're "informational." The GAO audits the executive branch; it does not command it. Two arms of the same government simply disagreed in public and carried on. * **What the law finally caught: a $4,000 sleep aid** * Congress tried the legislative route. The Truth in Broadcasting Act of 2005 (S. 967) was introduced on April 28, 2005 by Senator Frank Lautenberg, with cosponsors including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Edward Kennedy. It would have required prepackaged news stories produced by the administration to disclose their source, and it defined the target precisely: a complete, ready-to-use audio or video segment designed to be indistinguishable from one produced by an independent news organization. The Commerce Committee marked it up on October 20, 2005, renamed it the Prepackaged News Story Announcement Act, and reported it out that December. What ended up doing the actual enforcing was not a new statute about fake news. It was an old, unglamorous FCC rule about sponsorship identification — the same principle that makes a broadcaster tell you when something aired because someone gave them something of value. In 2007 the FCC found Comcast apparently liable for a **$4,000** forfeiture after its regional cable network CN8 ran portions of a VNR produced for a sleep remedy, Nelson's Rescue Sleep, with no sponsorship identification. On September 27, 2007 the Commission added **$16,000** for four further VNR incidents. The doctrine underneath those fines matters more than the amounts. The station hadn't been handed cash. It had been handed a free, finished, professionally produced segment — and the FCC treated *that* as valuable consideration. Which it obviously is. Ninety seconds of usable television that costs a newsroom nothing is worth real money to a newsroom that has no money. * **Why any station runs one** * Not because of a conspiracy. Because of a budget. A local newscast has a fixed number of minutes to fill every day and a shrinking number of people to fill them. A VNR arrives finished, legally cleared, visually competent, and free. The economics are the same ones behind churnalism in print — a press release with a byline — except television's version comes with pictures, a voice track, and a suggested anchor intro. This is also why the corporate VNR is the harder problem. The government kind at least has the GAO, an appropriations statute, and congressional hearings pointed at it. The Pfizer kind has only the FCC's sponsorship-ID rule and whether the station's news director feels like typing a source line on the screen. The 48-out-of-54 number tells you how often that happened when someone was actively watching. * **How to spot one** * **No reporter standing there.** Voiceover over polished footage, no on-camera presence from anyone at your station, no local landmark in frame. **Footage that's too good.** Inside a factory, a lab, an operating theatre, a corporate campus — places a two-person local crew does not get into on a Tuesday. Someone with access shot that. **A single named product, or a single named company, solving the problem in the story.** Real reporting on a health issue names the condition. A VNR names the brand. **An expert with no institution, or an institution that turns out to be the client.** Cross-check the name. This is the same test our guide to think tanks applies to the "nonpartisan expert" quoted in a print story. **A sign-off you can't place.** "In Washington, I'm —" followed by a name that doesn't appear anywhere on the station's own staff page. **No follow-up, ever.** A story the newsroom actually cares about gets a day two. A VNR runs once and vanishes, because nobody at the station was reporting it in the first place. * **The bottom line** * A VNR is not a hoax. Every fact in a well-made one may be perfectly true. The deception is structural — it's the format itself, borrowing the authority of a newsroom for a message a newsroom didn't write. The fix was never complicated. One line on the screen naming who paid. The counting showed that when nobody was checking, that line appeared in six broadcasts out of fifty-four — and that two-thirds of the stations publicly caught doing it did it again anyway. So when a segment on your local news is unusually well-shot, unusually flattering to exactly one company, and unusually free of anyone who works at the station: ask who made it. That question is the whole media-literacy skill. Everything else is detail.