PressEthic

Jennifer Bergin wrote about licensing fees on PressEthic before, and it has reared its ugly head once again.

How much would you pay to get an interview with President Bush or Kofi Annan? A plane ticket and car rental? Would you buy them a cup of coffee or dinner? How about money straight from your pocket? A few hundred thousand dollars? How about 16 times your tuition at NYU? Would you pay more if you were talking to Michael Jackson's juror or a convicted pedophile?

The New York Observer's Rebecca Dana wrote about "story brokers" this week, specifically Larry Garrison, who represented the family of missing teen Natalee Holloway, the best friend of Robert Blake's murdered wife, and Michael Jackson's jurors. Recently, he represents John Mark Karr, the man who falsely confessed to murdering JonBenet Ramsey.

Garrison compares himself to a lawyer. They help people maneuver through the legal system and he helps "clients navigate the media machine, specifically the news media," according to an excerpt from his new book, The Newsbreaker (eyeroll). But let's just say it: dude just wants to make a buck off other peoples' tragedy. And so does the news media.

According to Dana:

When something bad happens, story brokers are the people who help criminals and victims monetize their villainy or grief. They place themselves as middlemen between the supply of human drama and the demand for it—so news organizations have to do business with them."

“He finds a way for ordinary people to profit from extraordinary circumstances,” one ABC source said.

Some brokers—the disreputable ones, in Mr. Garrison’s account—provide a means for news outlets to bid on big-get interviews without the ethically messy expedient of paying the subject. Instead, the winning network or tabloid will arrange to interview the subject for free, while paying a hefty “licensing fee” for home videos or personal photographs to accompany the story. (Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s widow chose this month to go with ABC and Barbara Walters; NBC offered $500,000 in licensing fees, according to a source with knowledge of the deal, but CBS and ABC offered between $750,000 and $1 million each.)

"Licensing fees:" how clever and sneaky.

Now, ABC denies paying for an interview. ABC News spokesman Jeff Schneider says, "We do not pay for interviews. Period. We paid a fair license fee for hours of exclusive material of Steve Irwin. Compensating rights-holders for their video is something that is a standard industry practice."

Sure, it's standard to pay licensing fees for someone's photographs and personal videos. But "fair" isn't quite accurate. As the article states, ABC has a big checkbook and can pay out a lot more money for the "get" than other networks. And their "licensing fees" paid to celebrities and widows isn't exactly what they'd pay, say, a citizen's pictures of a housefire they wanted to run on the program.

What are licensing fees anyway? I searched and even this definition from the Museum of Broadcast Communications is fuzzy:

[Licensing fees] refers to funding that supports independent television production for broadcast networks or other television distributors such as cable companies. In this instance the license fee is the amount paid by the distributor to support production of commissioned programs and series. In exchange for the license fee the distributor receives rights to a set number of broadcasts of commissioned programs. Following those broadcasts the rights to the program revert to the producer. This form of production financing is central to the economic system of commercial television because the distributor's license fee rarely funds the full cost of program production. Producers or studios still must often finance part of their production costs and hope to recoup that amount when a program returns to their control and can be sold into syndication to other distribution venues. Nevertheless, the initial funds, in the form of a license fee, generally enable production to begin.

Hmm, who needs this money for production costs? Is Steve Irwin's wife planning on shooting a documentary?

I'm also wondering if major news channels paid government officials for their time. Most politicians want to get on TV no matter what, but how much did they offer Hillary Clinton for an interview after her husband did some naughty things with a cigar and an intern? How much would they offer to Saddam Hussein if they had an opportunity to speak with him?

And how does this change the interview? Wouldn't the interviewers go a little easier on their subjects if they knew hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to get them there? Most of these paid interviews seem like fluffy, soft-glow pieces with celebrities anyway, but it still brings up some important ethical questions for network, and cable stations.

How much is your ethical integrity worth?