At CBS: Ethics for sale?

Michael Jackson is the biggest international star ever charged with a crime.

CBS News and its flagship magazine show, “60 Minutes,” once were the brightest lights in the firmament of broadcast news.

Even if he is convicted of child molestation, Jackson will remain a celebrity of sorts. But by in effect paying him to sit for an interview on “60 Minutes” Sunday, CBS shredded whatever remained of its news division’s ethical standards.

The reaction to all this says something instructive about the melancholy state of American broadcast journalism. While Jackson’s televised defense of his predilection for sleeping with children and the new prominence of Louis Farrakhan’s disciples among his advisors have set off a seemingly endless chain of rhetorical bangs, CBS’ shabby demise has passed without a whimper.

“It’s the kind of thing that makes your stomach sink,” said Jane Kirtley, the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota. “CBS once was the gold standard among network news divisions and ’60 Minutes’ was the gold standard among television news programs. I am stunned that they’ve done this.”

CBS, said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, “has gone from one humiliating event to another in recent years. But it’s particularly demeaning to compromise your integrity so fundamentally over something as worthless as Michael Jackson. I suppose you could make a case for getting a story that laid bare the terrorist networks operating inside Iraq by paying for it. But to lose your reputation, as CBS now has done, to get more Michael Jackson?

“That’s really sad,” said Schell.

Like nearly every other broadcast entity in the whole wired world, CBS has sought a Jackson interview for most of the past year. The singer, in fact, stood up “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley last February after promising a chat. But unlike its competitors, CBS had an ace in the hole. When Jackson was arrested on seven counts of child molestation some weeks ago, the network had scheduled -- and virtually completed -- a musical special on which the singer performs songs from his new album.

At the time, CBS said that, while it was “mindful that Mr. Jackson is innocent until proven guilty,” it was shelving the program. The network said it would reconsider the broadcast “after the due process of the legal system had run its course.”

The wheels of justice, however, do not grind at television’s pace. Moreover, ratings are ratings and year-end profits are year-end profits.

Last week, according to accounts by the New York Times’ Bill Carter and Sharon Waxman, CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves began negotiating for an interview with Jackson’s defense attorney, Mark Geragos, and a Jackson advisor named Louis Muhammad, who is a son-in-law of Farrakhan, who leads the Nation of Islam.

According to the Times reports, Jackson agreed to give Bradley the interview and, in return, Moonves said CBS would air Jackson’s special Friday in prime time and will pay him $5 million in connection with the production.

Bradley taped the interview with the singer in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, and it was aired Sunday. Jackson’s special, whose delay he has blamed for his album’s lackluster American sales, will go forward as planned. CBS, according to one of its executives, is delighted to have the opportunity to broadcast before the buzz generated by the interview abates.

Checkbook journalism is a pretty dirty term, but it somehow seems inadequate to describe the arrangement. All that’s missing is a wire transfer to a numbered account in the Cayman Islands.

CBS, however, was unembarrassed. “We certainly would not have rescheduled the special if he had not addressed the charges against him on our air,” said Chris Ender, a spokesman for CBS Entertainment.

Right.

Who needs all that pokey old due-process stuff when you’ve had Ed Bradley look the defendant in the eye?

“What impresses me about all this,” said Schell, “is that, from CBS’ perspective, this is both a win-win and a lose-lose situation. Bradley gets the Jackson interview and they score in a cryptic sort of way with this special, which a lot of people will no doubt watch. But, at the same time, they lose their credibility and their reputation as a news organization by engaging in this sort of crass trade.

“What’s fascinating is how much more vividly their executives can see the short-term win than they can the far more serious long-term loss, which is their reputation.”

Calls to CBS and “60 Minutes” for comment on the payment issue were not returned by deadline.

But from the network’s perspective, the winning numbers couldn’t be clearer: With 18 million viewers Sunday, “60 Minutes” was the night’s most-watched television program, with an audience share 12% larger than its weekly average. It was even No. 1 among the younger viewers advertisers most covet. If the musical special does similar business, it’s an entertainment exec’s notion of a double play.

It’s also a journalistic debacle.

“I’m surprised and chagrined to see CBS practicing checkbook journalism,” said Kirtley. “Covering people’s expenses so they can come to your studios is one thing, but compensating anybody for telling their story is ethically problematic. It should raise the fundamental question in the minds of viewers or readers: Is this person motivated by a desire to tell the truth or to be paid? There’s no doubt that what CBS and ’60 Minutes’ have done deviates from American journalistic standards.”

In Schell’s mind, “television’s definition of news has become utterly corrupted by ratings wars that essentially are driven by entertainment stories. Maybe it’s time to dissolve the unholy marriage between the networks’ news and entertainment divisions.”

Kirtley said that “there is a sense among those of us outside the networks that the line between news and entertainment is increasingly blurred. We’ve also regarded CBS as one of the places where that trend was most strongly resisted -- until now.”

Most important, both analysts say, is the fact that practices like those followed by CBS in the Jackson case further erode the public’s understandably grudging willingness to take the trouble to distinguish between journalism and entertainment.

“That distinction already is lost on much of the public,” said Kirtley. “What’s happened here contributes to a further degradation of standards on which we all rely. When there’s no difference between news and entertainment in CBS News’ mind, how can we expect the public to see one?”