LastWeekTonight
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2023
21:22 · 7.4M views · May 24, 2021
A Last Week Tonight segment on sponsored content in local news. John Oliver explains why local news integrity matters and how paid content disguised as news erodes it.
HN links it in threads about native advertising and disguised ads as a good, funny overview of sponsored content passing as news.
3 comments from Hacker News
There's THE TRUTH and the truth ( [LINK] if you haven't seen that Simpsons episode). Let's say that I do an hour-long infomercial on a product and I try and make the infomercial look as much like content as I can. In fact, it's not just about the product. We talk about the news and weather as well. You watch 30 minutes of it and don't notice that at the end it says that it was sponsored. I clearly said it was sponsored. Just because you stopped watching before then isn't my fault, right? John Oliver did a great segment on this on sponsored content on local news: this video Google's search results used to use a different background color and borders to distinguish ads from organic results. Now they simply put "Ad" near the paid result. That makes it harder to detect what is an ad and what isn't an ad. I'm not saying that Google is being deceitful. However, they're certainly trying to make the fact that it's an ad less noticeable. If I put photoshopped mockups of a product on a page and then note in the description that they're not actually photos of the product, is that deceitful? That's certainly getting closer to the line (and I'd say crossing it) given extra distance. Amazon has made choices to make the "sponsored" tag less noticeable. It's a light gray and not bold so that it blends in against the background while your eye is drawn to the much larger 45% larger font-size and bold text next to it. Amazon could have chosen to make the "sponsored" tag larger, with better contras
There is a recent Last Week Tonight covering sponsored content on local news stations which is worth a watch as well. this video
I would say its hard to do any rational thinking about come to the conclusion that the 24/h news orgs are meant to inform you. The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about your product without doing any verification. There's also how a headline is not written by the author so it won't always reflect the contents of the article. > And a lot of the times is just because news are not validating their own beliefs IMO, the news orgs have a symbiotic relation with their viewers. The viewers want their viewpoint reinforced and the news org wants views. So the news org put out a biased product so that their viewers will selectively watch that news org. However, this still means that news org aren't actually trying to inform. My biggest gripe is how often they'll refuse to link to actual legal documents when talking about filed lawsuits and the like and in general I don't find some of their claims in the article to be as supported by the actual filings. [1]: this video