Churchville tells the Phoenix that WJAR has had a sponsorship agreement for coverage of what is now known as the CVS Caremark Charity Classic golf tournament for a number of years, including 2002, and will have it again this year.
“There is a paid commercial schedule for the CVS Charity Classic that includes half-hour programming, promotional spots, vignettes, and a Web contest,” she says via e-mail. “We do cover the event, weather and news content permitting, with an interview in Sunrise [early morning broadcast] and sports team updates during our news broadcasts.”
Churchville doesn’t perceive any ethical concerns with the promotional arrangement for the golf tournament, saying that it has come with full disclosure and the retention of complete editorial control by WJAR.
She says sponsorship agreements are common for televised sports events of this nature, and that with Channel 10’s interviews regarding the CVS tournament, “Sports is a softer segment, a feature segment in a news broadcast.”
Some local reporters view the situation differently. “This is unbelievable,” says one ProJo scribe, adding that eyebrows were raised across the Journal newsroom following discussion of the court testimony that revealed the agreement. “It just smells unethical.”
One local TV reporter notes that such a promotional arrangement seems highly unlikely to have an adverse effect on news coverage of other stories, “but it’s not a good perception to have out in the public that you have agreed in a contract to do certain interviews with executives of a private company.”
Barbara Meagher, a journalism professor at the University of Rhode Island, and a former reporter at WLNE-TV (Channel 6), calls the situation troubling. “Journalists alone should be making the decisions about which people they interview, and the sales staff should have no say in the matter,” Meagher says. “This is the clichéd ‘slippery slope,’ espe-cially in the minds of the public.”
Given the dynamics of a tight marketplace, in which the Internet is drawing advertising from television as well as from newspapers, any number of other TV stations might jump at the chance for the same kind of promotional agreement as the one between WJAR and CVS.
Another local TV reporter calls this kind of promotional arrangement “akin to selling advertising time.” While sponsored coverage of a legitimate sports event is not necessarily a problem, the reporter believes, it would become one if an advertising arrangement squeezed the already limited amount of time for news. “It is a business,” this source notes, and “every station is looking for creative ways to increase their ad dollars.”
Keep barking
Although local TV news in Rhode Island is hardly immune from some of the shortcomings of the medium — an exaggerated emphasis on the weather and other relatively incon-sequential stories, for example — each station employs reporters who pursue meaningful political and investigative stories.
WJAR, the traditional ratings leader in local news, experienced some recent layoffs as part of a sector-wide cut under new owner Media General, which acquired Channel 10 from NBC in 2006. The cuts reflect the tough climate for media companies. To its credit, though, Channel 10 remains the only station in the market with a full-time political re-porter, Bill Rappleye.
