"Let's face it," the video news release [1] (VNR) begins, "the days of doing homework like this are over."

The narrator was talking about children doing old-fashioned pen-and-paper research, but she might as well have been referring to KCBS-2 [2]. On January 27, 2006, the Los Angeles CBS affiliate aired a brief report on a new search engine that helps kids safely use the web, a crucial tool considering that "the Justice Department says one in four children will have an accidental encounter with Internet porn," according to the station anchor.

What KCBS-2 didn't tell its viewers is that the story—and all statistics contained therein—was provided by NetTrekker [3], the company behind the search engine.

The VNR was created by Medialink Worldwide [4] and distributed to news stations on January 26. In adopting the story, KCBS-2 removed the voice of the narrating publicist, Emily Wright [5], and replaced all on-screen identifiers with station-branded graphics.

The newsroom apparently hadn't done its own research, online or otherwise. If it had, it would have learned that the "one in four children" statistic came from a 1999 telephone survey [6] conducted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In the six-and-a-half years since the poll was concluded (a lifetime in Internet terms), nearly every major search engine has developed a free child-safe version [7] that blocks adult content. Whether it's better or worse than its competitors, NetTrekker is by far the most expensive [8], costing users $10 a month or $100 a year. The price tag was also left out of the KCBS-2 report.

Another version of the NetTrekker VNR found its way onto WJBK-2 [9], the Fox affiliate in Detroit, Michigan. Like KCBS-2, the newscast used an anchor re-voice and station-branded graphics to disguise the VNR as their own journalism. But WJBK-2 at least disclosed that NetTrekker was a paid subscription service.

To view the original VNR, as well as the KCBS-2 news story, click on the Quicktime links below.