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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we asked Judy Muller, a former correspondent for CBS News and ABC News. Currently, she is a contributing correspondent to PBS' "California Connected," a contributing commentator for National Public Radio and an associate professor at USC Annenberg School of Communication. (Full disclosure: Muller’s daughter is a CBS News producer in Los Angeles.) As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here’s Judy:

I used to think one of the ugliest words in journalism was “synergy.” This was a term used by network executives to describe the merging of news and other programming. In other words, it was a way to promote entertainment programming by camouflaging it as a legitimate news item. When the Disney film “Pearl Harbor” opened in theatres some years ago, for example, the anchors from ABC’s “Good Morning America” opened their broadcast from the real Pearl Harbor, along with some of the stars from the movie. The fact that it was summertime and nowhere near the anniversary date of December 7 did not seem to bother anyone.

Of course, to even suggest at this point that the morning “news” shows should adhere to traditional news values and resist manipulation by marketers (even by the parent company) is to be labeled hopelessly naïve. Personally, I hit bottom on the synergy issue when “Nightline” recently did a “news” piece blatantly promoting the Disney stage production of Tarzan. “Nightline”! Clearly, when it comes to synergy, nothing is sacred anymore. So I decided to tilt against other journalistic windmills. It didn’t take me long to find one.

My favorite new word to hate is “repurposing.”

This is more insidious than synergy because it has a legitimate aim – to take news stories done by traditional news organizations and modify them to fit other formats, i.e., the Internet. Yahoo!News does this all the time – and well. Yahoo!News always credits the original reporters and often links back to the original source material. Yahoo for Yahoo, I say. The problem with repurposing is that Internet journalism is the new Wild West, where a few outlaws think it’s just fine to grab original material and post it as their own. Where I come from, that’s known as plagiarism. My journalism students at USC think so, too, especially after they got burned themselves.

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