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add link to Fake TV News report
The term '''fake news''' has become synonymous with government and corporate sponsored pre-packaged news provided as [[video news releases]] (VNRs) and [[audio news releases]] (ANRs) to news outlets.
[http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary FAKE TV NEWS: WIDESPREAD AND UNDISCLOSED] is the title of a report released April 6, 2006, by the [[Center for Media and Democracy]]. This multi-media report is the result of an intensive ten-month investigation by CMD's senior researcher Diane Farsetta and research consultant Daniel Price. It documents for the first time how commercial propaganda -- fake TV news created by PR experts -- is being extensively broadcast as TV "news".
The Center for Media and Democracy and the media reform group Free Press simultaneously filed a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission requesting a crack-down on TV news fraud and calling for mandatory on-screen labeling of all phony news stories so that TV viewers know what is real reporting, and what is fake TV news.
A search of the [[Nexis]] media database indicates that the term was initially used more broadly. In May 1989 ''[[Adweek]]'' writer Barbara Lippert panned ads in which former newsreader Linda Ellerbee appeared in "in a fake news setting" hustling Maxwell House coffee. In August that year ''Ad Day's'' Ed Buxton criticised the use of "the fake news bite" where reporters re-enacted news events as part of a news story.