Checkbook journalism rings up big bucks for politicos

Everybody knew the networks were practicing checkbook journalism, but who knew the checks were so big?

Paul Sperry, writing in today’s Investor’s Business Daily, reports that Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was paid nearly half a million dollars by Fox News until he announced his candidacy.

Mike Huckabee’s payola was clearly labeled, but worth $500,000 a year? Fox also paid Rick Santorum $100,000 and John Kasich hauled in $265,000 a year, while doling out $1 million for a three-year deal with Sarah Palin.

The liberals at CNN do it too, contracting with Obama adviser David Axelrod to work as a commentator.

Who knows what made NBC think Chelsea Clinton was worth $600,000. Why that’s as much as three speeches from either of her parents.

The Society of Professional Journalists calls such checkbook “journalism” unethical for many good reasons — the foremost is that money corrupts and paying for information or sources corrupts journalism.

The SPJ Code of Ethic admonishes: “Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to news. Identify content provided by outside sources, whether paid or not.”

The SPJ warns about getting into bidding wars, which, as a former editor with a strict budget, I can appreciate, even if the networks do not.

Here are a few other SPJ reasons why checkbook journalism is vile:

First, paying for information immediately calls into question the credibility of the information. …

Creating a market for information that sells also raises the possibility that entrepreneurs looking to make money will create their own news, staging or inventing stories to attract the big checks.

Second, paying for information creates a conflict of interest. By writing a check for an interview, the journalist now has a business relationship with the source. Asking tough questions, examining the motives, weighing the credibility of a source — all of these journalistic functions become intricately more complicated when the source is someone receiving money for a story.

And third, once a media outlet has paid for information, it is less likely to continue to search for the details of the story for fear it might uncover conflicting information.

A source who chooses to tell a story and tell it exclusively should want to choose the reporter who has the clearest record of demonstrated competence rather than the one waving the largest check.

While it is true that journalism is a capitalistic endeavor and money must be made, being first and being exclusive should never be the primary motive of journalists. The primary motive always should be an accurate report.

There is a market for credibility. Once you’ve sold that, you’ve entered the world’s oldest profession.

 

 

 

Why did Obama snub the French free-speech rally?

Why did Obama snub the big French free-speech rally following the Muslim terrorist attack on a satirical Paris newspaper and a kosher grocery?

Paul Sperry, writing in Investor’s Business Daily, suggests the key lies in Obama’s extreme anti-colonialism.

This was theme Dinesh D’Souza explored frequently in his 2010 book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

Both writers point out how much Obama was influenced by Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born psychiatrist who fought for the independence of Algeria from French control and wrote about his anti-colonial beliefs.

Frantz Fanon via IBD

Obama even mentions Fanon’s influence in his first autobiography.

“If Fanon were alive today,” Sperry writes, “he’d take solace in the Muslim terror siege of France. He’d also be proud of his Oval Office admirer’s boycott of the French government’s protest march.”

He points out that when Obama took office he packed a bust of Winston Churchill and shipped it back to England, which many at the time suggested was another show of anti-colonialism. Obama’s father was a harsh critical of English colonial rule over his home country of Kenya.

“What really motivates Barack Obama is an inherited rage — an often masked, but profound rage that comes from his African father; an anticolonialist rage against Western dominance, and most especially against the wealth and power of the very nation Barack Obama now leads,” D’Souza writes. “It is this rage that explains the previously inexplicable, and that gives us a startling look at what might lie ahead.”

Sperry suggests Obama’s anti-colonialist sympathies help explain his French boycott, as well as his antipathy Israel, his appeasement of Castro and his bugging out of Iraq, Afghanistan and, pretty much, the war on terror itself.