Digital media company Group Nine Media Inc., which is backed by Discovery Inc. and owns The Dodo (“emotionally and visually compelling, highly sharable” animal content), has taken a minority stake in pet insurance company Petplan, the companies announced in a joint press release yesterday.
On Friday morning, NBC News posted an article to its website about premium dog food upstarts that soon became one of the most viewed articles about dogs on the Internet that day and through the weekend. The story, which discloses at the outset that NBC receives a fee each time any person clicks on any of the products mentioned in the story, offers no evaluations from veterinarians, except for the first paragraph, in which one vet is quoted saying that dog foods should be “complete and balanced.” There is no direct link from the quote to any of the companies discussed in the story; in fact, the quote itself is from a prior report. Next, a veterinarian is quoted as saying that it’s important for foods to meet AAFCO standards, which is more or less the same statement the companies, themselves, subsequently make.
What is not provided to readers is the fact that there are three possible AAFCO statements a pet food label can make, including a statement that is considered by many veterinarians to be a key indicator and gold standard for pet food, which is that the food has been through AAFCO feeding trials. None of this is explained, including, most important, the fact that none of the foods in NBC’s article have undergone the high standard of AAFCO feeding trials, as TCR has independently confirmed.
TCR is requesting a correction or clarification in a VIN News story by reporter Edie Lau. Lau has not yet made any changes to her story, nor has she responded to TCR’s most recent e-mail. TCR is publishing the exchange with Lau in full:
News Media Run False COVID-19 Dog Story, Refuse To Correct It Last month, a North Carolina family and their dog, Winston, became overnight celebrities when some of the country’s major news outlets unleashed a false and misleading story about the dog being the first in the United States to become infected with COVID-19 after Duke […]
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Dear Breeders, A private, closed Breeder Preservationist Facebook group whose members include several reputable breeders, has an administrator who has taken it upon herself to act as a media ombudsman and instruct each of you to self-censor by disregarding The Canine Review because we had the audacity to take on the mission of holding all […]
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