Why Shouldn’t Paying for a Story Be an Option?

Since the National Enquirer has already broken two big non-Hollywood stories this year--Jesse Jackson’s out-of-wedlock child and Hugh Rodham’s pardon payday--it can only be a matter of days before the likes of Brill’s Content, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Committee of Concerned Journalists and maybe even the soon-to-be-formed Committee of Deeply Concerned Journalists deplore the Enquirer’s use in both cases of checkbook journalism. And I will fearlessly predict right now that every one of these outraged journalists will be paid. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times, which has a policy against paying sources for information, is paying me to argue here that the policy is wrong.

Can it really be that getting paid for journalistically relevant information is only wrong if you’re not a professional? In other words, what makes journalists so special when it comes to the dangers of cash if money is really inherently and uniquely corrosive to journalism?

I think both assumptions in that last question are false. Journalists aren’t really so special. They have just figured out a way to seem to be, and the cash-for-amateurs ban helps a lot. Once, in the course of reporting for a Slate.com story about Internet prostitutes, I encountered a woman who said she’d tell me all about her business if I took her out to dinner at an expensive restaurant and paid her a $500 introduction fee. This was, she explained, what she charged for any initial (no sex) meeting. Now, conventional journalism ethics would OK the dinner, but nix the $500. But it was hard for my editor and me to see the difference between the two requests, and since in my judgment she figured to be an excellent source of information, (the important parts of which I subsequently confirmed), we agreed to both--and disclosed this in the article. The logic of the money-is-only-for-us position is kind of like a journalist saying “no comment” when he or she is asked a tough question. Oh yeah, they usually do that too.

The truth is that an offer of money for information will make some people more likely to lie or at least embroider. But it also will make some people speak the truth who wouldn’t otherwise speak at all. There is no magic way to tell which kind of person you’re dealing with. There’s only a nonmagic way--it’s called reporting. Money is only inherently corrosive to lazy journalism.

I have worked for a TV news magazine show (ABC’s “PrimeTime”) that does not pay sources for stories. What do these shows do when confronted with a potentially important source who is reluctant to come forward? They fly them across the country, put them up at five-star hotels, sit them down to elegant dinners and have a famous person they’ve only seen before on TV shower them with attention. This usually works. And there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with this manner of seduction. But is it any less likely to lead to fishy facts than peeling off a few 50s? Indeed, for most people, the mere prospect of getting on national television is as much or more of a temptation to fib as is a bit of walking-around money. The same point could be made about the prospect of being depicted in a national newspaper.

In their new book, “The Elements of Journalism,” two of the leading sheiks of the ethics-in-journalism cartel, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, announce what they call a “corollary” to a “rule” that states: “Obviously, journalists should not lie to or mislead their sources in the process of trying to tell the truth to their audiences.” This corollary, it turns out, is a little bit different from those propounded by Euclid, in that it remains true for only about five paragraphs. For the authors quickly allow that “journalists should use a test similar to the concept of civil disobedience” in deciding whether to engage in professional dishonesty. That is, if there’s not a totally honest way to get the story, they have to decide if it’s important enough to lie for.

Fair enough. But this sort of reasoning applies to giving money to sources. Writing checks to people who may know something shouldn’t be a journalist’s standard operating procedure, any more than lying. But when confronted with a person who will not come forward for free with a story that seems truly important, why shouldn’t payment be an option, just like lying?

The key thing here is that, as with lying, writing the check is not the end of the matter. It must be followed by the real work of checking out the information obtained. And a reporter can productively intertwine these two steps: paying a little up front and promising more if the source’s story checks out. The stigma should attach not to paying, but to failing to follow up. We should criticize the National Enquirer if all it did was pay sources, but its recent track record suggests it did plenty more.

A flat ban on getting information with a check, like a flat ban on getting it with a lie, gets the nature of journalism fundamentally wrong. Reporting is first, last and in between a judgment-intensive activity. Do I believe this guy? Do I have enough about what happened that day? Should I cold-call this woman, e-mail first or just ring her doorbell? There are no absolute answers, and hence no absolute rules. For every supposed journalism rule you can think of, there’s a great story out there, waiting to break it.