Following up on this item from yesterday on the company that paid another company to be featured on Headline News, CJR Daily’s Paul McCleary takes up the story and tries to get a comment from CNN and fails. McLeary makes some points I hadn’t considered yesterday when I was criticizing The Cable Game’s characterization of the story. And McLeary does a little digging and finds that there’s more to the story…

Doing a Google search of “Pulse on America” and “CNN” turns up all manner of press releases from companies “selected” by Platinum to be featured on “Pulse on America.” What the press releases don’t say, however, is that after having been “selected,” they presumably had to pay a large “licensing fee” in order to get their message out to CNN viewers, who think they’re watching a straight news segment.

It’s time that CNN come clean on this practice, and let viewers know what it is they’re watching: content that has been bought and paid for by interested parties that presents itself as news, but is anything but.