Fast food chains are successfully influencing news outlets to produce “covert marketing” for their brands, a new study has found.
The study, led by the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, analysed all press releases from McDonald’s, KFC and Domino’s Pizza in Australia between July 2021 and June 2022.
The findings, published on Wednesday in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, showed the press releases translated into overwhelmingly positive coverage of the brands.
Of 86 articles across 31 Australian news outlets that the researchers identified were generated because of the fast food brands’ press releases, they found 80 slanted favourably to the brands.
Mail Online produced the most articles of any news outlet with 20 items, followed by news.com.au (16), the Courier Mail (8), the Daily Telegraph (6) and the Australian (4).
Almost half (45%) of the articles profiled a new, unhealthy food product; more than a fifth (21%) promoted a brand’s corporate social responsibility credentials; while sponsored brand events, recruitment drives and new merchandise were the other main subjects identified by researchers.
Dr James Kite, a co-author of the paper, said the six news stories that were judged to have represented the brands in a negative light were reporting on a negative social media reaction to what was announced in the press release.
The researchers said the “implied endorsement” raises public health concerns given the poor nutritional quality of the foods sold by the brands and that several of the outlets publishing the stories were among Australia’s most visited news sites.
The researchers expressed concern about “press release journalism”, where reporters presented the preferred narrative of the organisations issuing the press releases. They said this “appeared to be the case for most of the news media items included in our study”.
They found four articles were identical to a press release, while press release content accounted for between 60% and 99% of a further 33 articles; 10 articles contained a mix (40% to 59% of press release content); and 39 articles contained less than 40% of material in a press release.
Kite said news content generated by these media releases was part of the brands’ marketing strategies. “They want journalists and news outlets to pick this up and run it favourably – and what our research shows is that they definitely get that.”
The paper noted “while the news media items included in our study were published by many different news outlets, none were published by Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, or by the Guardian”.
The researchers accounted for this by pointing to editorial policies at the ABC and the Guardian that prohibit the endorsement of commercial products. They suggested other news media outlets adopt similar editorial standards, especially when dealing with products harmful to health.
Kite said businesses have a right to promote their products but media organisations may need “a little push from regulation as well to make it clear that this is an unacceptable form of marketing”.
In the same edition of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, another study showed the food and advertising industries co-opted not-for-profit organisations to push back against a Queensland government policy proposal to protect children from unhealthy food and alcohol marketing on publicly owned assets.
The researchers used freedom of information requests to show that text within submissions that opposed the restrictions was almost identical between food, beverage, alcohol and outdoor advertising industries and five not-for-profit organisations, including three cancer charities, despite obesity and alcohol being risk factors for cancer.
Prof Kathryn Backholer from Deakin University’s Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition, the lead author of the second study, said “you can certainly see alignment between the industry arguments and the way in which the policy was watered down … and we’ve never seen the policy go any further”.
Backholer, who was also a co-author on the first study, said “we know unhealthy diets are the No 1 reason for disease and death in Australia and elsewhere”.
However, “the more that these unhealthy foods are written about, the more they’re marketed, the more that it normalises that these foods should be part of an everyday diet”.
Unhealthy diets are related to an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease, as well as some cancers. By failing to prevent such marketing tactics “we’re just setting our kids up for a lifetime of increased risk of disease”, she said.
Prof Simone Pettigrew, the program director of food policy at the George Institute for Global Health, said “these studies highlight the sophistication of the unhealthy food industry in the many and varied approaches being taken to promote products in a post-TV world”.
“The strategies being employed involving policy influence and garnering unpaid media coverage demonstrate the ability of unhealthy food purveyors to bypass the existing inadequate controls that continue to focus on traditional media environments,” Pettigrew said.
News Corp Australia, Nine Entertainment and Mail Online were contacted for comment.
