McNews era tips the balance

PRESENT TENSE:WE DON'T GET Fox 5 News Las Vegas morning show in these parts, but we became familiar with its presenters and set this week - particulary the McDonald's drinks placed strategically in front of them, writes Shane Hegarty.

Neither cup contained the purported iced coffee, being filled instead with (a possibly more appetising) combination of brown goo and plastic ice cubes.

Why so much interest in them? Because the morning show has ushered in the dawn of a new era in product placement. Having conquered Hollywood, small screen dramas and sports, and turned kiddies' television into one day-long toy commercial, product placement has finally breached TV news. And the sound of the world's media gnashing their teeth was second only to the whooping in the McDonald's marketing department.

The strange thing is that it took a couple of weeks for anyone to notice. The fast food chain's deal extends to several stations across the US, and if a pair of Swedish love pumps had been placed on the news desk they would have been less obtrusive. Still, once noticed, the images rapidly did the rounds of the world's print and broadcast media. The story was helped by the fact it was Fox (an ethically wobbly broadcaster that people gorge on, knowing they'll feel bad for it later) doing a deal with McDonald's (an ethically wobbly restaurant chain, etc).

So the coverage came with the disapproving tuts of the world's newspapers and broadcasters. Although their commercial wings may have had more empathy with Fox's excuse that, at a time when advertising revenues are plummeting, a TV station has to try any which way it can to make a buck.

Shoring up advertising revenue is indeed a major challenge at a time when ads are easily skipped by the growing army of Sky Plus users. The McDonald's coffee cups, then, are the television equivalent of the pop-up ads that spill all over web pages in an effort to annoy you into just glancing at them.

The US presenters ignore the product, expecting it to be subliminally imbibed by the viewer, meaning that the tactic is pretty insidious. Just for a moment, though, let's put the moral objections aside - and they are heavy ones - and ask if Fox isn't just doing in a profitable way what the rest of the media are already doing every day, at the expense only of their own integrity.

It may be distasteful to see that a news programme gives such blatant prominence to a global corporation, but how many times have you turned on RTÉ news to find a reporter standing in the foyer of the Savoy cinema, gushing about some movie he's been sent to cover simply because it has Pierce Brosnan in it? It is not unusual to hear such reports being rounded off with something along the lines of "the film's makers say this is a feel-good hit all the family can enjoy", or some other bit of puffery. What is this if not unpaid product placement? And RTÉ is not alone in this. It is endemic across broadcast news, with TV3 proving so masterful at entertainment packages that it spawned a spin-off series, Exposé.

The Fox morning show, in fact, is one of those news-lifestyle hybrids that has become common across breakfast shows. These include Ireland AM, also on TV3, which veers between news bulletins and lengthy unpaid advertorials for various chocolate makers, hairdressers, florists and whoever else happens to strike it lucky that week.

Just because these are not paid-for product placements, and are therefore subject to editorial control, does not distance them entirely from the tactics used so openly on Fox. Unacknowledged product placement is currently prohibited on Irish television, although, because laws differ across the EU, a new harmonisation directive means that countries will be obliged to examine allowing product placement in drama (although not in news, current affairs, documentary, advice or children's programmes).

However, it might be interesting to see how commercial broadcasters would grab such opportunities if they were available. Already, sponsorship and competitions have allowed acknowledged product placement to become rife on radio and television programmes such as The Late Late Show.

Product placement on television, though, is a relatively straightforward matter compared to the complex approach of the print media. Obviously, journalists are not drinking branded colas in their byline pictures, but they tread a thin line in other ways. Many of the world's newspapers are now padded with rewritten press releases, movie premieres and product-laden lifestyle sections. There is paid-for advertorial content that is not always clearly presented as such. There are property supplements whose attitude during the boom years would have come under more scrutiny if the advertising revenue hadn't been so crucial. And even if a proprietor does not directly interfere with editorial content, his influence will be obvious in the reporting of his own businesses - or in the negative coverage of a rival.

Much of that veers a bit away from the simple idea of placing a logo-covered cup on a desk during a news bulletin, without acknowledging that they are there to rescue revenue rather than slake a thirst. Nevertheless, if they've offered a focus on the practice, it's worth taking a step back and asking if those plastic ice cubes are only the visible tip of a very large berg.