FAKE TV NEWS IS A REAL-LIFE PROBLEM.

Byline: Mariel Garza Columnist

Last September, Channel 7, the ABC affiliate for Los Angeles, aired a story during the 5 p.m. Tuesday newscast about a blood test to find allergies in kids.

It looked like a legit news story, with interviews, graphics, cute kids and a voice-over by a Channel 7 news reporter.

It wasn't, though. The report was a canned video news release, or VNR, produced for and paid by Quest Diagnostics, a company that runs labs around the country that do this very sort of testing. There was no disclosure by the station that the piece was an advertorial.

To its credit, ABC7 acknowledged airing the VNR.

"ABC7 Eyewitness News has a policy against using VNRs in their entirety or even using excerpts without appropriate attribution and original reporting to confirm or contradict the claims in the VNR," Cheryl Fair, vice president and news director said in an e-mail response to my request for comment.

"Nonetheless, a VNR about an allergy test called Immunocap did somehow slip through the cracks last September. We continue to review our editorial process to ensure full compliance with our policy."

There was really no point in denying it. The Center for Media and Democracy posted the video of that fake news report on its Web site, one of 36 VNRs aired on 77 stations all over the country including two others in L.A., KCBS (Channel 2) and KTLA (Channel 5) as part of the results of a new study (www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary).

That may indeed have been a one-time oops by ABC7, but the center's study suggests that the practice of using VNRs and disguising them as news is widespread. But you wouldn't know it because most of the stations that were caught airing the corporate VNRs never identified them as fake news. Nor did they mention the "news" reports were bought and paid for by a corporate sponsor such as General Motors, Intel or Capital One, and were often one-sided and, in some cases, flat-out lies.

Those of us in the print media, however, miss no opportunity to smack around television news for being vapid, celebrity-driven and regurgitating the stories that we, the "real" journalists, report. Hey, they are our competition, not to mention better looking and better paid than we ink-stained schlubs.

But this goes far beyond lazy journalism into the land of sinister public manipulation.

Daniel Price, a Los Angeles consultant, novelist and co-author of the VNR study, said what was most surprising about the findings was the level of complicity among news stations.

Price expected to find the fake news to be used, "but not as much the active deception in part of newsrooms, to what extents they would go to disguise the VNRs." For instance, some stations used graphic embellishments to make the reports consistent with the stations. Others used voice-overs. One Fox station identified the "reporter" on the fake news report as being a Fox representative.

And what's worse is that it appears news stations didn't even check the veracity of the reports. If they had, the General Motors-sponsored segment claiming that the company had pioneered online car sales would have been found to be bogus. Price did a quick Nexus database search and found the claim was simply not true.

So what's the harm in fake news? Maybe nothing if the dispute is over who invented online car sales. But Price said many of the segments are produced for pharmaceutical companies. What if a doctor sees a fake news segment and prescribes a drug based on what appears to be a good news story, but really is well-disguised advertising?

So how can you tell the fake news from the real news on the TV news? You can't.

"Even I can't tell," said Price, noting that he suspected some pieces of being fake news only to discover they were just bad journalism. And since the study only tracked a small percentage of VNRs for a 10-month period, there's probably much more fake news than we know.

Anyone worried about the prevalence of fake news could contact the Federal Communications Commission and demand that it put a stop to advertising passed off as news. But there's something else you could do right away: Read newspapers instead.

Yes, I am biased. We may not be perfect, but when one of us tries to pass off a press release as our own work, we get in trouble. And it won't be long before print Web sites have just as much on-demand video as news.

Besides, you can tell by our paychecks we don't do this job for the money.