Junketing Journalists

The televised scene is both vivid and startling. Registering at a Manhattan hotel, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TV Critic Win Fanning is handed an envelope. He opens it and finds two $10 bills. The money--for "taxis and miscellaneous" --comes from CBS, which regularly flies TV reporters to New York to screen new network shows, paying their expenses and tossing in some mad money besides. Even more startling, the scene was broadcast this week by CBS on 60 Minutes, as part of a critical story about press junkets financed by corporations in hopes of favorable coverage.

Networks--not to mention other news organizations--rarely pillory themselves in public. Don Hewitt, executive producer of 60 Minutes, reports no attempts by CBS executives to soften the intramural slap: "I've not felt any pressure or even heard from anyone at the network, although it's obvious that they knew that we were filming Fanning." (Asked on the show whether CBS was "buying" his opinion, Fanning says: "It just plain isn't true. In the first place, all the networks do it.") Reporter Mike Wallace offers some tart, on-the-air criticism of his network: "Ironically, while employees of CBS News are forbidden to go on junkets, the public relations people in another CBS division are busy setting up such junkets."

CBS is by no means alone. 60 Minutes shows how car manufacturers, airlines, athletic teams, foreign governments and various packagers of entertainment and recreation seek the good will and attention of journalists. "With enough stamina," Wallace says, "an enterprising reporter just might be able to keep traveling and eating on someone else's charge account forever." American Motors Vice President Frank Hedge tells Wallace that his company's last three press demonstrations of new models were held at the Smoky Mountains, Lake Tahoe and Catalina. When Wallace suggests that such sites are chosen to encourage journalistic gratitude. Hedge replies: "You're absolutely right."

Understandably, none of the newsmen Wallace interviewed admitted that cushy treatment could affect his judgment. Indeed, Wallace notes that some prominent journalists who have gone junketing in the past--including CBS Anchorman Walter Cronkite--"scoff at the notion that their reporting can be bought." But even if all reporters were invulnerable to blandishment, the venerable practice of junketing would still be a sticky problem. Wallace asks whether the suspicion that journalists are being influenced by favors is not enough to damage press credibility--especially at a time when the press is investigating unethical behavior in other places, including the White House.

Paul Poorman, managing editor of the Detroit News, tells Wallace that it is "dishonest" for reporters to accept favors, although he also admits receiving a press discount on the purchase of a car three years ago. Poorman has since chaired a study on junketing for the Associated Press Managing Editors, and forbidden News staffers to accept any gratuities at all, but he sees no quick reform: "The whole issue is greeted with tightly controlled apathy on the part of many newspapermen."

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