News Corp’s fossil fuel advertising dressed as news should be illegal
News Corp’s fossil fuel advertising dressed as news should be illegal
independentaustralia.net
News Corp’s fossil fuel advertising dressed as news should be illegal
LAST WEEK, News Corp’s newspapers The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Adelaide Advertiser caused controversy by publishing front page “exclusives” and “special reports” alleging that more gas is needed to avoid electricity blackouts in the future.
If readers turned the page and read the fine print, they would learn that this so-called “news” was actually not news. It was an advertorial (a fancy word for an advertisement), paid for by – you guessed it – the fossil fuel industry.
This is deliberately misleading. I'm not sure why you think it can't be outlawed, numerous laws exist regarding false and misleading advertising which is exactly what this is.
It is not reasonable to expect even a majority of people to pick up on this kind of deliberate deception.
Making this kind of deliberate deception illegal would not be limiting freedom of speech, opinion pieces and clearly labelled advertising are one thing, a front page story with no indication that it is not news is another.
Why should we abandon the vast majority of our population, just because we're not forced to attend school? Education isn't limited to the classroom!
It's less a solution and more a coping mechanism. I am in support of promoting these skills, but I'm also in strong support of mitigating the commecialisation of news media as much as possible. And that includes outlawing these kind of articles.
Why not both? The media should absolutely be forced to do their job properly, and people should absolutely be educated to spot bs.
@Moc
‘Forcing’ is akin to tyranny and would limit our ability to explore and debate perspectives other than our own thereby closing ourselves off from any possibility of ‘learning’, ‘growing’ and bettering ourselves.