B-Roll Reality: Let the Buyer Beware

“I’m Karen Ryan reporting.” Thus spake the ubiquitous “reporter” in the HHS video news release about the Medicare bill that so many “news outlets” used as if it was a real “news report” by a real “journalist.” She is, in fact, a PR pro, not a journalist.

Yep, it’s that thin line between journalism and PR. The Columbia Journalism Review “spin busters” even took her and the Administration to task over this bit of deception, naively so, considering the actual reality of journalism. They did a fair job explaining how the “news report” came to be, but somehow treated the episode as unusual, which it is not. So before we all pile on to the “trash Karen” bandwagon, like she did something unusual or unethical, let’s take a breath and look at the matter of press releases, and the unholy alliance between journalists and PR pros.

All manner of interested parties pop out of the woodwork to “help” journalists these days. These helpers outnumber the journalists by such a wide margin, and are so well trained by folks like, well, the Columbia School of Journalism, that it’s almost impossible for a reader, or even a working journalist, to sort out the more or less unvarnished story from the spin. And every organization and business, those you agree with and those you don’t, does this.

Maybe everyone knows how this works, but before castigating the Administration and Karen for putting out a video press release that looked like a straight news report, it might be helpful to enlighten the six people still unaware of how modern journalism really works.

Say you’re a lowly working stiff TV journalist. The day starts with a pile of press releases, some paper, some videotapes, called “B-rolls.” The “B-rolls” are of especial use to news organizations too cheap to send a crew to interview the “sources.” Plus, who’s got the time to pull this together working at a daily news org, like a newspaper or a local, or national TV news station?

So what you do, if you’re a real pro with class, is chop up the “B-roll.” You edit it so that the “Karen Ryans” of the world get dropped out and you then videotape your local reporter or anchor asking basically the same questions and cut that together with the experts’ answers. You make some calls to make sure it’s not totally bogus.

Then it hits the air. No news consumer would ever guess you aren’t seeing ace reporter Joe Blow really talking to said expert, served up by the interested party. Only hacks (and I mean that nicely) working with no time or money are forced to actually leave the PR “reporter” in the piece, like happened this time.

That said, even without the “B-roll” business, a lot of times when you see a famous on-air talent “interviewing” someone, what you’re really getting is some nameless producer for the show doing the live reporting with the subject and then later, in the studio, the big name re-tapes the questions and editors cut it all together.

This doesn’t just happen in TV news, or at smaller, cash strapped operations. For a print example, in today’s New York Times there’s a small story by reporter Denise Grady. I happen to have worked with her a long time ago and let me assure you that she’s as good as it gets. But this will illustrate how the same sort of reality bending goes on in print.

She “broke” the news of a study in today’s New England Journal of Medicine that shows benefit for osteoporosis from a Merck drug called Fosamax. I grind no axe here; like I said, Grady is a perfectly fine and typical journalist.

She got this story, probably, a couple of days ago. And some of her phrasing and certainly the thrust of the piece are pretty similar, save for a cursory rewrite here and there, to the press release that Merck put out announcing the report of the study in the NEJM. Grady did make a few calls to get a few fresh quotes, because, like I said, she’s a pro and it’s the New York Times. So you can’t just cut and paste a release or you’ll get blaired for sure.

Another point: It’s standard for the NEJM to embargo stories from its latest issue, but release the material to selected journalists early, especially at The New York Times. Allegedly this is so the NEJM can make sure us poor dumb reporters have plenty of time to interview the researchers involved and get the story right.

It just so happens that this embargo business also gives the NEJM a convenient “exclusivity” angle to maximize its clout with the New York Times and other powerful, brand-building outlets. This makes the NEJM a “prestigious” must read among a host of equivalently prestigious journals, and helps get those drug company ads to pack its pages. This is not the motivation, I’m sure. But it has made the NEJM a giant among regional society medical pubs.

Now there’s nothing wrong with all this. Journalism is not neutral and does not live in some ivory tower vacuum.

But there are B-rolls and cooked and spun stories everywhere. And poor Karen shouldn’t bear the brunt for it, like she crossed some line never crossed before.

She’s a PR pro, or less politely, a flack, as I am sure she would be the first to admit. She’s no journalist; she’s a huckster selling you stuff, which in our world is considered a perfectly respectable thing to do. ¶ 11:19 AM