ABC may be confused: Sunday is a day to relax, not to relax journalistic standards. At least four times in recent months the network's World News Sunday show has used its end-of-the-news feature spot to showcase big-budget flicks of the parent company, Disney.

It started small. On Sunday, March 22, correspondent Steve Osunami visited a working class South Boston bar, the L Street Tavern, whose claim to fame is that it played a part in Good Will Hunting, the Miramax (Disney) film. Two minutes, ten seconds. The story line: the proprietors were pleased to have been in the movie and hope the local hang-out will become another Cheers as a result. The end.

Then on May 24, it was The Horse Whisperer, a release from producer Touchstone Pictures (Disney). A two-and-one-half-minute piece profiled a "real-life horse whisperer," as correspondent Bill Redeker put it. Like Robert Redford's character in the movie, the man trains the animals through gentle communication.

Next, on Father's Day, June 21, correspondent Mark Mullen briefly mentioned the holiday in order to segué into a two-and-one-half-minute piece on the upcoming A&E Television Network biography of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and the real-life dramas that went on behind the scenes of their 1950s sitcom. Yes, the program won positive critical acclaim and, yes, viewers were probably interested in the hidden sides of the picture-perfect duo. And, well, yes, Disney owns 37.5 percent of A&E (with Hearst, 37.5 percent and General Electric, 25 percent). ABC was the only network to see the documentary as a news story.

Good Will Hunting and The Horse Whisperer were also receiving decent reviews at the time they made ABC World News Sunday. Armageddon, produced and distributed by Buena Vista, another Disney arm, was not. The asteroid-aimed-at-Earth movie seemed a possible flameout, despite a $140 million budget.

Maybe that's why ABC chose July 5, only four days after the movie's release, to explore the likelihood of a massive asteroid destroying Earth. This was a full four months after the real story of the mile-wide asteroid that had made the world's front pages, when it briefly looked as if it might ruin our day on October 26, 2028.

Correspondent Judy Muller used Armageddon and its summer killer-asteroid competitor, Deep Impact, produced by DreamWorks, to introduce a very light science piece titled, "Are They Really Hurtling to a Spot Near You?" (a nod, it seems, to "Coming to a theater near you"). The two-minute-twenty-second story allowed researchers to talk reassuringly over clips of Armageddon's Billy Bob Thorton. Muller mentioned the other movie, but only by way of saying, "No sooner had Deep Impact wiped out Manhattan when Armageddon came along," a statement followed by -- you guessed it -- several clips from the Disney film. (ABC Sunday Night News anchor Carole Simpson did acknowledge Disney's ownership of Armageddon).

It might be argued that media companies, such as Disney, have become so large and multi-armed that their news divisions can hardly help but touch on company products. And that the news people shouldn't fret if their story is legit. On the other hand, all four of these stories were clip-laden and -- in style and message -- resembled nothing so much as commercials. As Simpson put it in her preface to the Good Will Hunting piece: "Movies are big business, and not just in Hollywood."

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