Thursday, November 10, 2005

Lines blurring between News and Advertisements.

Where can one draw a line between news and advertisements ? Nowadays, it seems that people with money can make sure that distionction is blurred..."news" is decided based on how much one can pay !

The New York Times Public Editor rues this fact in an excellent piece criticising NY Times for starting a trend that seems to blur this line - watermark ads in the NY Times in the Business Day section devoted entirely to tabular matter. But, it can have interesting effects, as one example points out...

  • Prudential Financial's well-known rock logo showed up underneath a fullpage of stock and mutual fund quotations in one of the early watermarkads in The Times on Oct. 6. It was especially hard to miss for anyreader seeking information on that page. And if you happened to be aCitigroup shareholder checking the price of your stock, you would havefound it buried in the middle of a competitor's logo
Times of India had also started the concept of paid editorials a while ago and that caused a furore among the Indian Media houses...

One must often wonder as to how far we can trust any information that is being fed to the common public by these media conglomerates...in both of the above cases, the newspapers mentioned have the largest circulations (english language) in their respective countries !

Maybe blogs are the only way to go - where independant people put up their own versions of events and opinions, etc. But then again with the number of blogs growing at a tremendous rate every day, I forsee a future in which searching for factually accurate information will be more difficult than the search for the proverbial needle...

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