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Video news reports produced by University of Hawaii communications staff are popping up in hundreds of Hawaii newscasts, raising questions about the integrity of local journalism and whether broadcast stations are delivering fair, independently reported coverage.

Since last year, the university’s new seven-person media production team has been sending ready-to-air video news releases containing footage of various events and announcements to the state’s three broadcast stations. (Read related story on UH’s new stepped-up public relations effort.)

A report generated by local media monitoring agency shows that, as of mid-March, the stations — KHON, KITV and Hawaii News Now, which includes KFVE, KGMB and KHNL — had run UH-produced videos in morning and evening newscasts 333 times.

With the filmed interviews showing only an anonymous microphone, the videos are made to look like regular news reports. They contain captions bearing the university’s logo, although it’s unclear whether the public is always told the segments are actually produced by UH.

This practice — what the Center for Media and Democracy calls — has for years been the subject of heated debate. The Center’s public relations watchdog site in 2005 reported that video news releases, or VNRs, had “become a staple of broadcast and cable news programs.”

Most of the controversy has revolved around whether or not stations were disclosing the news reports’ sources. Under Federal Communications Commission regulations, broadcasters .

Still, labeled or not, VNRs and the public’s right to fair and independent reporting, wrote Scott Libin, a broadcast news director and former faculty member, in 2011.

“The problem is that those packages are often laughably lopsided, as if there were no opposition to the position supported by the producers and providers of such material,” he wrote. “The stories are devoid of the diverse voices and perspectives that enrich real journalism, enabling its consumers to reach informed opinions of their own and to make better decisions for themselves.”

Libin was referring to VNRs that were produced by federal and state agencies intending to “plant political messages in newscasts.”

UH’s videos are meant to spotlight the “great things happening on every campus,” said former KITV reporter Dan Meisenzahl, who last April was hired to run the university’s media production team.

Ann Auman, a media ethics professor at UH, said that well-produced VNRs have become commonplace in newscasts across the country.

“Ideally news stations should always do their own reporting,” she said. “The reality is that they don’t have enough journalists to cover everything.”


Auman said it’s critical that the stations credit the videos’ sources to ensure viewers are aware the stations didn’t produce them.

“The station needs to be transparent about their sources,” she said. “That’s what gives them credibility.”

Meisenzahl compared the VNRs to regular press releases and stressed that the university loses control over the videos once they’re released — a disclaimer that he explains to everyone involved in the stories.

“They can spin it in a negative light, attach it it to a negative story or get the facts wrong,” he said, citing a recent VNR in which a news station referred to a heiau as a burial ground.

“There is a big difference to the Hawaiian community and that error mortified the UH faculty involved,” he said. “Bottom line, we have no control once we hit the send button besides asking for a correction after the fact.”

Hawaii News Now News Director Mark Platte said he uses the VNRs sparingly but that they can come in handy — especially for neighbor island ceremonies or groundbreakings for which the station can’t afford to send a stringer.

“I’m not crazy about using them all the time,” he said, adding that the station always attributes the reports to UH. “But it’s a way of getting video on the air that’s not controversial and interesting visually.”

Meisenzahl and the media production team approached Platte with the VNR proposal last year, Platte said.

“I wrestled with it,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it on a regular basis as a regular feature.”

The HNN stations now air the VNRs under very specific circumstances and only when it’s clear that they aren’t doctored or one-sided, Platte said, noting that the videos are produced by professionals who have TV experience.

And Platte emphasized that Hawaii News Now regularly produces independent — and often critical — coverage of the university, pointing to a that revealed UH Manoa’s head librarian could be making $195,000 a year.

As of March 15, Hawaii News Now had run UH videos 141 times, the Dateline Media report shows.

The Dateline Media report includes data for 44 videos that have been sent out since last May. The media production team has produced — many of which also appear on UH websites and the university’s sports channel.

Meisenzahl says he only sends out VNRs featuring stories that he thinks stations would probably cover if they had the available resources. The university rarely knows what stations will be covering an event until it happens, he said. The media team does head counts at the events and sends VNRs to the stations that don’t attend.

The creation of the media production department and the decision to send out video news releases reflect a larger effort to modernize communications at the university, said Lynne Waters, the UH system’s associate vice president for external affairs. Until last year, the majority of the university’s websites didn’t contain video.

Waters also lauded the initiative as providing a particularly effective and relatively cheap means of promoting the university’s image and demonstrating to the public all it has to offer.

“If we don’t tell these stories, who will?” Meisenzahl said, referring to the tendency among media outlets to focus on negative news. “We can’t just sit around and hope someone tells the complete story. UH has to proactive and tell its story consistently and that is one of our many missions.”

Both Waters and Meisenzahl said the videos are one public relations effort whose results are clear.

The university hired Dateline Media to monitor its TV clips and measure their effectiveness based on metrics such as and publicity value.

The report, generated March 15, shows that UH’s news videos have reached more than 9 million viewers total. Their total “calculated ad equivalency” — what it would’ve cost to run them as 30-second ads during the news casts — was estimated at more than $185,000.

And their calculated publicity value — the product of an industry formula that multiplies the ad equivalency by three — was nearly $557,000.