My latest column for CTNewsJunkie.com:
Hartford HealthCare, perhaps the state's preeminent healthcare organization, has a peculiar and less-than-honest marketing strategy: blanket the media, especially television, with advertising that looks like news and place its doctors and executives on those same stations to be interviewed by actual journalists.
The practice raises ethical questions -- less on the part of HCC itself than on the stations that host these ads and segments. The line between marketing and news is being blurred, no doubt because of the sustaining revenues generated for participating media outlets.
The problem ... is that HHC's TV advertising strategy has expanded to the point that it relies heavily on commercials designed to look like news segments. The company's experts are often interviewed by journalists – or paid hosts who look like journalists or are former journalists – but ask softball questions. I first noticed this trend about a year ago. I figured it would go away as soon as the pandemic started to fade. I was wrong.
Read more ...
I wasn’t imagining this, then. Thank you @terrycowgill for this OP-ED | Medical Behemoth's Marketing Strategy Raises Troubling Questions | CTNewsJunkie https://t.co/MOUmaq5oxX
— Kathy Flaherty (@ConnConnection) August 2, 2021
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