The Center for Media and Democracy presents a startling indictment of TV news stations, who use video segments produced by PR firms for corporate clients and present them as their own news stories:

A station in New York showed — as news — a video produced for a drug company that touted their new supplement as a “major health breakthrough” even though a widely reported government study had found that it was little better than a placebo.

In one case, a TV station even went as far as to remove safety warnings from a video promoting a new prescription skin cream.

The TV stations never disclosed that they were presenting sponsored items as news.

In more than half the cases, the TV station disguised corporate promotional videos by having one of their reporters re-voice the audio, sometimes merely repeating the original narration word-for-word. In other cases, the station identified the narrator in the video as one of their reporters, even though that person worked for a PR firm hired by a corporation.

We are talking about TV stations during their news programs presenting supposed news stories that are actually corporate advertisements in disguise. Over 100 TV stations — both large and small, which broadcast to 53% of the US population — regularly use corporate-sponsored videos called VNRs (video news releases, a combination of video news and press release). Their conclusion is that a significant amount of TV news is really bought-and-paid-for corporate propaganda.

More information and tips on what you can do about this.

UPDATE: Perhaps not very surprisingly, a new poll says that more people trust Internet news than TV or radio. And this is not a new development — I found an unrelated poll from March that shows that pretty much the same thing.