LAS VEGAS - PRODUCT PLACEMENTS HIT NEWSCASTS

Product placements, familiar on game shows and sitcoms, have now moved onto the sets of television news shows. The Las Vegas Sun on Monday reported that the two cups of McDonald's iced coffee sitting on the anchors' desk on the  KVVU Fox 5 TV News are merely replicas, "made-to-scale models that weigh something like seven pounds each." News Director Adam P. Bradshaw told the newspaper that the cups, emblazoned with the McDonald's logo but which receive no mention during the newscast, represent a "nontraditional revenue source" for the station. In an interview with today's (Tuesday) New York Times, Brent Williams of the ad agency Karsh/Hagan, which arranged the product-placement deal, said, "If there were a story going up, let's say, God forbid, about a McDonald's food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald's, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set." But the Times quoted Harold Feld of the consumer advocacy group Media Access Project as saying that expanding product placements into news "raises very troubling [ethical] questions."

22/07/2008