The New York Times spent 1,200 words Monday fussing over the well-known practice at NBC News and ABC News of paying sources for tabloidy stories like those about Anthony Weiner's Facebook correspondent Meagan Broussard and Jaycee Lee Dugard, the young girl in California held captive for 18 years.
The two networks don't call the payments for stories "payment for stories," of course. They hide behind the fig leaf of "licensing fees," in which they pay subjects for photos, home movies, and whatever else is at hand—and it's not uncommon for these sales, I mean "licensings," to include an interview with the subject.
"[P]roducers at NBC's Today and ABC's second-place GMA regularly end up in bidding wars for deals for candid and exclusive interviews," the Times reports.
Julie Moos at the Poynter Institute writes that networks sometimes pay licensing fees to sources for emails and cellphone records, too.
As I've written before, the practice of paying sources for information may stink, but it's been around so long that it's hard to smell it. Life magazine paid the Mercury astronauts and their wives $500,000 for their stories ($3.9 million in today's money), according to a 1959 Time magazine article. In 1975, CBS News paid H.R. Haldeman between $25,000 and $50,000 for an interview, defending the deal as compensation for a "memoir," According to Time magazine. Other beneficiaries of the CBS News checkbook included Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson (after they had left office), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Walter Lippmann, and G. Gordon Liddy. NBC News paid Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, reports the American Journalism Review. It's not an archaic practice, either. Three years ago, filmmaker Errol Morris acknowledged that he paid soldiers who committed offenses at Abu Ghraib to appear in his documentary Standard Operating Procedure.
My thinking about paying for sources hasn't changed much since I wrote that column. The downside of the practice, as we see in the United Kingdom, where tabloids routinely pay for stories, is that it encourages the idiotic and sensationalistic coverage about celebrities and politicians. One ethicist frets that the practice gives the rich a monopoly on news: If the rich are willing to pay the price, they can inject whatever "news" they want into the press and suppress that which they don't want known.
The problem with most of the ethical handwringing is that it rarely deals with the question of who benefits when news organizations don't pay their sources. It's the news organizations, of course, who get something of value—a captive's story, the saga of an adorable set of sextuplets, the titillation of a sexting relationship with a member of Congress, et al.—for nothing. If it's unethical for NBC News or ABC News to purchase, I mean license, somebody's story, why should it be ethical for Little, Brown or Random House to buy the same story, mix it with the labor of a ghost writer, and put it between hardcovers under the byline of the subject?
Poynter's Moos and other ethicists believe that paying sources for information damages the credibility of journalism because it may, as she writes, "encourage a source to say things that are untrue and it may encourage them to dramatize the truth." But money isn't the only thing that can encourage a source to speak untruths or dramatize. Unpaid sources frequently lie, and many love to dramatize for effect. Even "reliable" sources—the usual operators on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, and at the Pentagon—routinely sell information to reporters, only they don't expect money in return. All sorts of non-cash benefits can accrue to those who provide reporters with information: They can undermine their political or corporate opponents; they can help tip the story to their side; they can win publicity for their causes; and by virtue of appearing as a named source in a story, they increase the chance they'll be called upon later by reporters to provide more information.
One of the Poynter ethicists counsels that if journalists pay sources, they must disclose how much they paid, what exactly they paid for, and whether a source's travel, lodging, or meals were covered. This sounds great to me, but focusing on cash is an overly narrow conception of benefits. To maintain ethical parity, shouldn't reporters also have to disclose how their sources, named and unnamed, benefited by sharing information with the press?