Newsmmercial

Yesterday I could see, completely astonished, a commercial inserted in the middle of a news bulletin in La Primera, the main public television channel in Spain.

Unfortunately, it's not that unusual to see an advert in the news, even in the public television. Statistically, it's also likely to see it in the sports section, as was the case, since sports occupy most of the time in the news. The problem is that this advert closely mimics a news program, with a speaker that offers an utterly false announcement, such as "Gasol retires from basketball" or "Nadal retires from tennis". And then the news continue. I suppose someday (or maybe at the end of the program) a final commercial will show the brand or the product. But so far, you can hardly notice that it's an advert (only because the speaker was not any of the usual ones; otherwise, she did a damn good job as a newsreader).

I could hear the stupid newsreaders of the real program joking next about this advert (That ain't true, of course! Ha, ha!) And they had to do it twice, since there were two of these commercials intermingled with the real news.

I know these advertising techniques that try to get attention; they are not new. But when a public television accepts inserting this kind of fake-news commercials seamlessly in the middle of a real news program, with no warning whatsoever, and the journalists that work there (being the truth their only presumed asset) accept it as well, joking as if nothing had happened, definitely there's something very, very wrong here.

I hoped that my public television would firmly refuse to do that, and in case this happened, the workers that show their face in the news would stand up to this and go on strike. "Are you
going to insert a fake news while I'm speaking, just to make some bucks? Definitely, not in my program, not under my name, and not after my face."

But, sadly enough, truth and fair information weigh too little nowadays.