With thousands of journalists losing their jobs, how are the media filling all those column inches?

Press releases.

As media companies buy up more media outlets and slash newsroom budgets and staff, reporters have less time to do their jobs, often resorting to writing entire stories based on a press release alone, and sometimes printing stories that mirror an organization or agency’s exact press statement.

It seems actual reporting is becoming something of an anomaly, and especially in science coverage, according to ongoing analysis by MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Charles Petit, a veteran science reporter who runs the Tracker, has found an alarming number of newspapers running stories based only on press releases.

“What is distressing to me is that the number of science reporters and the variety of reporting is going down. What does come out is more and more the direct product of PR shops,” Charles Petit told the Columbia Journalism Review.

Press releases should used as a tip, or a starting point, to begin investigating a story. Crafting questions, finding holes in data, reaching beyond the press contact – that’s where the true journalism lies. As Petit told CJR, science news “spoon-fed” to reporters via press releases “become a powerful subversive tool eroding the chance that reporters will craft their own stories.”

What’s worse, many newspapers aren’t fessing up to their press release plagiarization, leaving readers unaware that the story they’re reading came straight from the pen of a PR flack.

While Petit is monitoring science journalism, the practice of presenting fake news as as the real thing has infiltrated local television news across the country.

A 2006 investigation by Free Press and the Center for Media and Democracy revealed that stations are slipping corporate-sponsored “video news releases” — promotional segments designed to look like objective news reports — into their regular news programming. This deception is illegal under FCC rules.

A series of CMD investigations have caught 113 local stations airing the so-called VNRs without proper disclosure. Free Press and CMD have filed complaints with the FCC, urging the agency to take action against all stations that have violated sponsorship identification rules. So far, the FCC has fined only one cable channel for airing fake news.

And just why have television stations resorted to airing VNRs? Runaway media consolidation has squeezed TV newsrooms, too, which are trying to fill more hours with fewer reporters.

If we want to stop junk journalism, we need to start at the top with the owners of our media.