CNN did not return repeated calls for comment over a three-day period. A news director who had received the Medicare VNR from CNN and run it told Campaign Desk she contacted CNN to complain. She was referred to the company’s lawyers.

And it’s not just news services like CNN’s for whom VNRs are big business. Moskowitz of Medialink told us that a total of around 3,000 VNRs are made each year. Medialink uses technology created by Nielsen Media Research that implants a code into each frame of a VNR, letting Medialink track where, when, and for how long the VNR is played on TV. That allows it to report back on how much bang its client is getting for his buck. In the case of the Karen Ryan-Medicare VNR, which ran on over 50 stations, sometimes more than once, that bang appears to have been substantial.

Moskowitz argues that the VNR material is clearly labeled as such when Medialink provides it to CNN, and he believes that CNN, in turn, takes appropriate measures to identify it when passing it on to the local stations. But he admitted that he can’t speak to how every station receives the information. And as news directors told Campaign Desk, the format varies.

Moskowitz also argues that VNRs have been in use since 1948, and that there’s no ethical difference between VNRs and print news releases, thousands of which are faxed or emailed to news outlets every day, and some of which are run by newspapers in their entirety. Bill Pierce, a spokesman for HHS, pointed out that the Bush administration is hardly the first to use VNRs. But not all VNRs are created equal: Neither Moscowitz nor Pierce could point to a VNR produced for the federal government that, in the midst of an election campaign, promoted legislation as politically-charged as the Medicare benefit. Nor, more importantly, does there seem to be a precedent for an administration making a VNR that includes a p.r. professional impersonating a reporter, and signing off “reporting from Washington.”

While spokespeople for HHS, as well as Ryan herself, suggest that the stations are responsible for what they put out, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) sent an open letter Thursday to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson stating that, “material distributed to television stations that doesn’t identify the government as the source and ends with a voice-over such as, ‘In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting’ is outside the bounds of ethical behavior for HHS or any other government agency.”

And a New York Times editorial Saturday agreed, taking HHS to task for the VNR incident, and for its “foolhardy obsession” with claiming that Ryan is a freelance journalist, not an actor. “Credibility is indeed at the heart of the matter,” opined Times editors, “…for an administration intent on spinning its way toward November.”

As for the local news stations, they’re still reeling in the wake of being embroiled “in a national controversy,” in the words of Carla Stanley of WTVQ-Lexington, who described her station as being “in crisis mode” upon learning, thanks to Campaign Desk, that they had run the controversial footage.

Many told us they would take advantage of the Medicare incident to provide a learning experience for staff. “I’m using it as a teaching tool,” said Stanley.

As far as we’re aware, only Tom Henderson’s WTVC-Chattanooga has run a correction. Other news directors said they’d discuss the idea with company brass, but, as Veazey of WAGA-Atlanta put it, “you hate to call too much attention to the fact that you screwed up.”


Campaign Desk Staff Reporters Liz Cox Barrett and Susan Q. Stranahan contributed additional reporting to this story.