WHITE HOUSE - MEDIA CRITIC CONDEMNS WHITE HOUSE VIDEO PRESS RELEASES

Ken Auletta, the media critic for the New Yorker says that the White House has cut back the number of news conferences the president holds in favor of brief one-on-one interviews with individual reporters and distributing video news releases to TV stations. "This White House has been pretty aggressive about getting its video news releases out there to local stations," Auletta said in an interview with ABC's Nightline. "And local stations, which increasingly are under cost pressures, want to raise their profit margin. They like cheap news programming. It's basically public relations masquerading as news. We shouldn't allow that without a disclaimer at least."

28/02/2007