For years we were told that if we ever knew how a hot dog is made, and if we ever knew the precise ingredients within, we’d be sickened by the mere thought, then avoid hot dogs for ever and ever, if not longer.
The same can now be said of commercial TV’s national newscasts, all of which ask us to regard them as the most trusted, reliable and credible on TV. But if you only knew what goes into making them.
For example, as Tiger Woods’ floozies began to out themselves, then get in line, why did this one or that one give first shot at their stories to this or that network’s news department? Why — or better asked, how — did they choose, say, to give their exclusive interview to ABC News instead of CNN, NBC, Fox and CBS? All, after all, were eager to speak with them.
Answer: Money.
The network that successfully recruits the most relevant, once-unknown players in any scandal deemed TV newsworthy generally pays the most money to those players.
The networks don’t flat-out write a check to these people — that would be “checkbook journalism,” and highly unethical, something those sleazy supermarket tabloids do, ya know?
The networks’ news producers instead will ask how much the player or players — usually the “other” woman or women in the scandal — want for personal photos or video. Does she have a rep to negotiate for her? After all, the network doesn’t own the rights to her photos, thus how much would it cost to, ahem, rent those rights?
And, with a wink and a nod, the network that bids the highest almost always wins the exclusive interview. “It’s now a common practice, across the board,” a network news producer last week told me. “You ask the person something like, ‘How much do you and the photographer who took your wedding pictures want for the rights to the photos?’
“And then the rest becomes understood: If you give us first crack at your story there’s money in it for you. That’s how it now works. Not very pretty, is it?
“Sometimes, depending on the story, you can land the interview for 500 bucks, sometimes a thousand, sometimes 10 thousand. Did you see the testimony, the other day, about ABC in the Caylee Anthony case?”
Caylee Anthony is the two-year-old, who in July 2008, was first reported missing by her family in Florida. The child, however, apparently had been missing for a month before authorities were contacted. Caylee’s mother’s stories neither checked out nor added up. Even before Caylee’s remains were found, Casey Anthony, 22, was indicted for murder.
Last month Anthony’s attorney revealed in a Florida courtroom that ABC News paid his client $200,000 in exchange for photos and video of the dead child. CBS News, it has been reported, previously paid a $20,000 “licensing fee” to Caylee’s grandparents.
Sick, ugly stuff, no? Checkbook journalism? Big time. Not what you’d expect from the world’s self-described most trusted and honest names in broadcast journalism, is it?
And to think that network news departments, while laying off dozens of staffers, have tens of thousands of dollars available to pay the country’s most dubious souls for the first chance to tell their pathetic stories.
“It’s a disgusting practice and everyone’s guilty,” said the same news producer, “but ABC is the worst. It pays the most, thus it lands interviews that others thought they had locked up.”
Imagine if a network news department found a politician, or a Wall Street firm, or a police department to have conducted its business in such a manner. That network’s investigative unit would be nominated for two or three Peabody Awards.
In the meantime, I’d put more blind faith in the contents of hot dogs sold on the sidewalks outside the headquarters of national TV news divisions, then I would in the conduct of the shot-callers within — those who call themselves broadcast journalists.