In the lead-up to National News Literacy Week this week, I fielded two separate studies asking people who should be held accountable for misinformation that causes social harm.
One study, conducted by B2B researcher Advertiser Perceptions, asked a panel of advertiser and agency executives. The second study, conducted by consumer …
I wonder how many of the 600 consumer respondents realized that in most cases advertisers who "sponsor" TV news have nothing to say about their content are merely buying time in their commercial breaks. In fact, looking at the second table, one might ask the same question about the 120 "advertisers" who responded.
@Ed Papazian: I don't know that they were responding explicitly about advertisers sponsoring TV news, so much as media companies -- especially social media platforms -- that disseminate misinformation. With a couple of noteable exceptions, most TV news outlets are not considered to be disseminating misinformation.
That said, IPG Mediabrands plans to begin rating TV news outlets via NewsGuard, so we'll see how that nets out this year.