No one will tell you to wash your face, so you can look better than
they do. Sicilian Proverb
What a scam news organizations
have been running all these years!
Imagine any other industry in the
world declaring it “unethical” for them to have to pay for the raw material
they use to make and sell their product.
Wouldn’t the electric companies
love it were the world to believe it is unethical for coal companies to charge
them for coal? The electric companies
would make a fortune off the free coal, but the coal industry would be turned
into slaves, supplying all that coal for free.
Of course, the coal company would just stop producing coal if no one
paid for it.
Wouldn’t the construction
industry love it were the world to believe it is unethical for sheet rock
companies to charge them for sheet rock?
The construction companies would make a fortune off the free sheet rock,
but the sheet rock industry would be turned into slaves, supplying sheet rock
for free. Of course, sheet rock companies would just stop producing sheet rock
if no one paid for it.
The whole thing sounds very
anti-capitalist - telling one group they may not profit from selling their own
product, while the people making that rule do profit from it.
Yet news organizations have
successfully pulled off this scam for decades.
They refuse to pay money for an interview with someone in the news, while
they make gobs of money themselves off that person’s interview.
But the landscape may be changing. According to an Associated Press
report, network television has been skirting around the “no pay for
interviews” rule by purchasing items from the interviewee, such as photos of
events the interviewee witnessed.
They should ditch the rule
altogether, and people giving interviews to newspapers and television should
insist on a price.
Take a look at the phony
“problem” the news industry claims could occur if they pay for interviews,
according to the Associated Press story:
“Policies against paying for interviews are
in place to avoid distorting the news. The concern is that news subjects will
change their stories to make them more valuable or please those who paid them.”
But
doesn’t that same concern exist when the news organization tries to “sell the
story” to the public to get ratings and get paid by advertisers? NBC putting explosives under a truck and
falsely reporting that the truck blew up from a collision rings a bell. Jayson
Blair made a career out of fabricating stories in the New York Times. And who could forget Dan Rather’s forged
document scandal that appeared to end his career at CBS News?
All humans being equal, there’s
no more or less concern for members of the public telling the truth than there
is for journalists lying. Fact checking
is the guarantor of truth, and who is getting paid money for their time and
effort has nothing to do with it.
As we know from “balloon boy’s”
father, attention whores like him will falsify stories whether they are getting
paid or not. Money is not the corrupting
factor – ego is - and journalists have to fact check regardless of the
interviewee, whether they are interviewing Bill Clinton about Monica or Mother
Teresa about lepers.
The Associated Press article
details the “new trend” of paying for peripherals like videos or expensive
plane tickets and hotels for the interviewee, and quotes Paul Friedman, a veteran of CBS news who laments, "If we all drew a line again, maybe we
could stop this, but that's probably hopelessly naive. It's out of the
bottle."
Out of the bottle, and let’s pray
the cork is lost.
This issue is akin to intellectual
property, as when a musician has a song.
Until a witness to an event tells
his story, there is no story. A singer
shouldn’t give his melody away to iTunes to make money alone, and neither
should a person with an eyewitness account give away his story to the media for
free.
It’s a capitalist country. Sell what you can, and never let the other guy
get yours for free.