Press corrupted by fake news: Addendum

By Hume's Ghost

Well, I don't call my blog The Daily Doubter for nothing. Looking at my first post here, it has come to my attention that sloppy writing on my part in the post on the widespread infiltration of faux news reports is misleading and needs to be corrected. I'm not sure what the blogging ethics of this are, so I'm going to identify the corrections here and then add this Addendum onto that post.

The way I have it written, it sounds as if the bulk of the VNR's being investigated by the FCC are government sponsored. That is not the case. The vast majority of video news releases are created by corporations (the VNRs tracked in the CMD's report were corporate sponsored ones). The Center for Media and Democracy notes

When considering "fake news," it's important to know that the vast majority of VNRs produced are for corporations. For this reason, VNR producers are happy to have media attention focused on government VNRs.

I'm afraid that's what I have done. While the problem of government sponsored VNRs is a significant problem, the widespread corporate ones are just as insidious.

But here is the most misleading part of my post

But here is what bothers me about this story. We already knew this. Back in January of 2005, the New York Times reported that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had found that these undisclosed VNR's constituted illegal "covert propaganda."

Ok, we already knew that the press had been corrupted by fake news, but the GAO had not found that "these" VNRs constituted covert propaganda. It could not have, because the GAO was only commenting on the use of government sponsored VNRs. Obviously, what I had written makes it sound if all the VNRs in the CMD's report were government propaganda. This should have been written as:

... We already knew that the press had been corrupted by fake news. Back in January of 2005, the New York Times reported that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had found that the creation of undisclosed VNR's (by the federal government) constituted illegal "covert" propaganda.

I apologize for not taking the time to sort this out before posting it. I have a bad habit of posting what are essentially rough drafts of my thoughts and then going back to edit, revise, and develop the post as I look at it. That might be ok at my blog, but this one deserves better than that, so I'm sorry for this confusion.