Newspaper and TV News editors would love to publish awesome, hard-hitting  investigative reports every single day, but those types of stories require a bunch of  investigating and interviews and time.

An easier, and less expensive route is to produce news stories that are copied and pasted out of press releases. For example, if a drug company has just found that Sobertol has been 99% effective at lowering blood-alcohol levels, they fax a copy of their findings to the news stations, and they FedEx a tape  (perhaps Beta SP or DVC-Pro) which contains nice, dazzling graphics and footage that is totally, 100% ready to put on television. 

These fill air-time so easily, a lot of  cost-conscious television news producers use them every day. 

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