Two lucky TV news anchors in Las Vegas get to pose with plastic glasses of MacDonald's iced coffee during their news-and-lifestyle morning show on the Fox affiliate.

From the July 22 NYT (thanks, Mungo):

... The anchors rarely touch the cups.

Executives at the station, one of 12 owned by Meredith Corporation, say the six-month promotion is meant to shore up advertising revenue and, as they told the news staff, will not influence content.

“There was a healthy dose of skepticism, and I’m pleased there was — it means they’re being journalists,” said Adam P. Bradshaw, news director of KVVU. The product placement was first reported Monday in The Las Vegas Sun.

The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.

“If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.

If that did not happen, “it might lead to the termination of an agreement” to appear on the show, he said. KVVU, for its part, said it would continue to report truthfully and honestly about McDonald’s. Mr. Bradshaw said the station would remove the cups, just as it would remove spot advertising from a newscast for any advertiser who is the subject of a negative report.

With the economy in rough shape and advertisers funneling more dollars to the Internet, the television industry is trying to increase its revenues. Neither the agency nor KVVU would reveal the price of the six-month deal.

How do the Big Three U.S. networks handle this?

The three major network morning shows, ABC’s “Good Morning America,” CBS’s “The Early Show,” and NBC’s “Today” do not accept fees in exchange for product placement, representatives of the shows said Monday.

“It is against CBS News’s standards to accept money in exchange for product placement on any broadcast, and we do not do so,” Kelli Halyard, a CBS spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail message.