All the News That’s Fit to Pay For?

The Al Qaeda training and propaganda videotapes airing on CNN and CBS may or may not shed additional light on the terrorist network’s activities. But the questions raised about their provenance are a window on the murky issues that arise when journalists pay for what they report as news.

The tapes aired thus far show pre-Sept. 11 footage of Osama bin Laden posturing, various terrorist training exercises and the killing of a dog with what some analysts believe may be a chemical weapon. After initial denials, the cable network now admits it paid a still unnamed intermediary in Afghanistan $30,000 for 64 tapes with more than 100 hours of recorded material. CBS purchased 30 tapes from the Magnum photo agency for what a network spokesman calls a “pretty low” sum.

Spokesmen for both CNN and CBS have repeatedly said their organizations are certain that none of the money went to Al Qaeda or anyone associated with it. Given their unwillingness to divulge details about the tapes’ source, it is assurance that, so far, must be taken on faith.

It is an accepted principle of American journalism that reporters should not pay for information. Doing so, most journalists believe, creates a situation in which sources are encouraged to deceive or sensationalize in hopes of receiving a better price for their wares. However, broadcasters and magazines routinely purchase videotapes and photographs from freelancers. When they do so, however, the source is almost invariably identified in an accompanying narration or photo credit.

The two networks’ failure to do that and their initial reluctance to acknowledge paying for the material “raises a big set of questions,” said Michael Parks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent who now directs the School of Journalism at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications.

“One of the things that makes this hinky,” said Parks, “is that we don’t pay for news as a matter of principle. There are, of course, harmless exceptions. When a reporter takes a source out for drinks and dinner, that could be construed as a kind of payment. Networks and local stations buy freelance footage and photos without much control over its origin, though we expect them to make a judgment when they see it. But there is a general agreement that when we allow news to become a commodity to be sold, we are distorting the reporting process and injecting an incentive to falsify.”

CNN and CBS, according to Parks, a former editor of The Times, “created this problem when they failed to disclose their payments. Their viewers have a right to know how they came by these tapes and from whom. Their viewers have an absolute right to that information. Transparency is the first consideration here because where the money went is a question of public interest. I don’t think any news organization wants to be in the position of financing Al Queda or its allies, but by not disclosing forthrightly who precisely was paid and how much, they’ve raised that question and put themselves on absolutely treacherous ground.”

Novelist’s Enemies

Poet and novelist Michel Houellebecq, French literature’s reigning enfant terrible, once remarked that “the truth is scandalous.”

So, too, apparently is speaking one’s mind.

At least that is the contention of four Muslim organizations that have sued Houellebecq for defaming Islam in his new novel, “Plateforme,” and in an interview with the literary magazine Lire.

The 44-year-old Houellebecq, who one French critic has described as “the Camus of the information generation” is no stranger to controversy.

Various of his stories and poems have outraged the religious right. His 1998 novel “Les Particules Elementaires”--called “Atomised” in its English translation--enraged the French left with its scathing portrayal of the “generation of 1968.”

Last May, however, when an international panel of judges awarded “Atomised” the $100,000 Impac Dublin award for new fiction, they called the book “darkly brilliant.”

The protagonist of Houellebecq’s new novel says that he experiences a “quiver of glee” whenever “a Palestinian terrorist” is killed.

The story’s climactic scene involves an assault on a resort by Muslim terrorists.

In the Lire interview, the author called Islam “the stupidest religion” and said he found reading the Koran “so depressing.” (Houellebecq has been hospitalized several times for depression.)

Saudi Arabia’s Mecca-based World Islamic League, the National Federation of French Muslims and the Paris and Lyon mosques have joined in a suit alleging the novel and interview defame their religion and violate French laws on tolerance.

If they prevail, the author could be sentenced to a year in jail and fined more than $50,000.

Houellebecq, who lives in Ireland, has declined to comment, though he intends to testify when the case comes to trial in September.

However, his lawyer, Emmanuel Pierrat, compares his client’s situation to that of British writer Salman Rushdie, who was placed under a fatwa, or death sentence, by the Ayatollah Khomeini for his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

According to Pierrat, “the two cases are very similar.... Both Salman Rushdie and Michel Houellebecq are great writers. We are not dealing with small-time provocateurs.”

Work in Progress

Joan Didion’s most recent books are “Political Fictions” and “The Last Thing He Wanted”:

“I’m fact-checking a book that seemed finished and now is in pieces, scattered around my office. I don’t know when it will be done. Knopf has talked about putting it on their fall 2003 list, but to do that I’d have to give it by the first of November.

“This is something I began in the early 1970s, when I started writing what I thought was a book about California. I never got very far with it. I’m not sure why I didn’t. Part of it was that other things became more urgent. But I suspect that part of it was that my mother and father were alive and to continue would have meant actually addressing certain things I must not have wanted to get into with them. A lot of what the book was about was the difference between what I had been told and had believed growing up in California and what I now observed about the state. At the center of it was the whole myth of redemption in the crossing of the continent, though what we had been redeemed from was never spoken of.

“Anyway, over the past 10 or 12 years, I did a couple of long pieces, and it seemed to me that they were actually about the same thing and that I still hadn’t resolved it. So I picked it up again last year, coming at it from a different angle. My father was dead and though my mother was still alive, she died in May of 2001.

“Then I had to set it aside again to make some money. I picked it up again right after Christmas and have worked on it off and on ever since. This summer it was finished--in a manner of speaking.

“I don’t even have a title, which shows how unclear I am that I’ve actually finished it. No title is quite right for what it is. If I could grasp that, I’d have a title. I started going through my family’s journals of their crossings and arrivals in California, and that’s where it starts now. The reading that I’ve done as part of this that was most stunning for me was Josiah Royce [the 19th century philosopher and California historian]. He is amazing, so troubled. He never came to terms with California--with what he had wanted it to be and what he found it to be. I notice now that the person I keep quoting most to make whatever point I’m making is Josiah Royce.

“I’m thinking of calling this book ‘Where I Was From.’ John [Gregory Dunne, her husband] doesn’t like it because it sounds too much like a memoir, which would be misleading. It’s not a memoir; it’s really a contemplation of California.”