Money vs. ethics
By Mike McGraw Posted Apr 1 2003
A Moscow PR firm engineers a “sting’’ operation, revealing that 13 newspapers demand money for printing what turns out to be a fake news release about an appliance store opening.
The Association of Journalists in Macedonia says it will publish a blacklist of journalists and publishers known to take payoffs from government ministers or political parties and goes so far as to suggest a licensing scheme.
The former head of Egyptian state television news appeals a sentence of 15 years of hard labor for taking a $2,000 bribe from a doctor who hoped to appear on his popular television show, “Good Morning Egypt.”
Although it’s important to remember that honest journalists are still being killed because of their work (54 in 2002), it would appear from these and scores of other recent cases around the world that an increasing number of journalists are succumbing to the same human frailties they usually write about.
In some cases, it may be a simple matter in which opportunists are just now realizing the potential of the written word. In Kenya, for example, one writer observed that the press has recently been infiltrated with “charlatans, extortionists and blackmailers.”
But overall, what some see as a pandemic of media corruption emanates from a host of complex and varying forces that go well beyond the principles of individual editors and reporters, say ethicists, public relations practitioners and journalists.
Those forces include faltering economies, low pay, intense competition continuing pressure for higher profits, conflicts in the publisher’s office and the strange dynamics generated when communist regimes give birth to free market economies.
And the cost of this creeping malaise is soaring. It robs the press of credibility and hobbles emerging democracies that need a free and independent press to stay the course. It also deprives readers of useful news, such as stories about the importation of expired drugs or investigations of corruption in the mayor’s office.
In some countries, it may threaten the very existence of newly emerging and slightly more independent media. In China, for example, businesses and NGOs find it cheaper to pay journalists to write stories than to pay for advertising that might have less impact, says a journalism researcher in Beijing.
The researcher, who asked not to be named, said the practice flourishes despite prohibitions in the national ethics code for journalists and began after media outlets lost government subsidies. Journalists can earn up to 500 yen — often more than a month’s wages.
In Russia, government officials make no secret of paying off journalists, says Yevgenia Albats, an fiercely independent investigative reporter who lectured at Yale last fall on politics and the media in Russia.
“They want the public to know they are paying off the press,’’ she says.
“If the government can show the press is corrupt,” she says, “then they (readers) are not that much concerned about the fact that the state is taking over the media.”
When reporters and editors from 29 countries gathered for a Salzburg Seminar in Austria last March, they noted a precipitous and widespread decline in the media’s role as a public trust.
Among other things, they recommended that journalists everywhere “adopt professional standards that promote high-quality journalism.”
Katerina Tsetsura, a Russian journalist now working on her doctorate at Purdue University, did just that a few years ago.
While working as a freelancer for regional newspapers in Voronezh, Tsetsura was offered money — about half her average monthly earnings — to write a series of positive stories about consumer products produced by a local manufacturer.
She turned down the offer, but she is pretty sure another journalist accepted it, arguing that it helped supplement his already low wages.
“This is the biggest excuse journalists in Russia have (for taking bribes) ... that they are so poorly paid,” Tsetsura says. “But I don’t buy this argument … no matter how much you get paid there are always people out there who will offer you more.”
In Nigeria, it is called “brown envelope.” In Russia, it is called zakazukha, hich roughly translated means “order,’’ such as an order someone would place in a restaurant, says Kirill Semyonov, father of the Russian sting operation that caught newspapers demanding money for editorial content.
Semyonov, a managing partner of the Promaco public relations firm, says he hatched the idea because every time his firm would contact newspapers about printing news releases, “they would immediately send us to the advertising department, and they would say ‘OK, we are interested, but it is advertising.’”
Promaco called a press conference on Feb. 26, 2001, to announce the opening of a non-existent appliance and electronics store, “Svetophor,’’ at a non-existent address. The company later reported that more than a dozen publications negotiated to run the story as a news item in exchange for
payment.
Invoices were issued, and eventually 13 articles appeared.
Writing of the sting operation in The Moscow Times, Alexei Pankin, who edits Sreda, a magazine for media professionals, says “The most surprising thing about this story is that a fact that everyone in Russia has long known is [now] being presented to Western readers as if it were news; namely, that a huge portion of the Russian media is thoroughly corrupted.’’
But the real value of the sting, he noted, is that it showed that the Russian media is slowly progressing towards professionalism.
After all, he says, only 13 of 21 newspapers actually took the money. He expected all 21.
The newspapers that printed the “stories’’ never even checked the accuracy of the news release, noted Frank Ovaitt, who co-chairs a campaign by the International Public Relations Association to end such practices. “All they checked was the color of the money,’’ said Ovaitt, of Crossover International in McClean, Va.
A survey of IPRA members in the aftermath of the Russian sting revealed media corruption in most of the 52 countries surveyed. The cash for editorial problem is especially apparent in Central and South America and Eastern Europe, the survey found.
IPRA and the U.S.-based Institute of Public Relations are working with Tsetsura and Dean Kruckeberg, of the University of Northern Iowa, to build an index, expected to be published in the spring. The index shows what factors are most common in countries where journalists are most likely to demand money in return for editorial content. The International Press Institute, which publishes The Global Journalist, has been asked to participate in a survey that will help the researchers build the index.
The findings so far indicate that bribes are much more common in countries where journalists are poorly paid. Not surprisingly, other factors include levels of education of journalists and the general population and the degree of accountability of governments to their citizens.
But the problem often goes much deeper.
“For decades, journalists in Russia were obliged to the government and to the party, and that still lingers,” says Alexander Lupis, Europe & Central Asia Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“There was journalistic obedience to the state from 1917 to 1980, and that is a huge legacy to overcome,” says Lupis, who believes media corruption is not necessarily increasing but is just better documented now than before.
Pressure from a faltering economy is also hard to overcome, notes Patrick Butler, director of training for the International Center for Journalists in Washington. The case of an Argentinean journalist Butler identified only as “Bernardo” illustrates the point.
Bernardo was the editor of the main newspaper in a medium-sized city. When the economy was good, there was never any question about the paper’s principles. Accepting money from a source to kill or skew a story was unheard of.
But things changed after the economic crisis hit in late 2001, Butler says.
Bernardo, who had recently attended an ICJ ethics program in Washington, noticed that a short story he edited about an alleged minor act of wrongdoing by a city official wasn’t published the next day. When he asked why, he was told that the paper had agreed to print only positive news about the mayor’s party in exchange for a regular subsidy.
Bernardo was outraged, but arguments to his boss went nowhere. He decided he couldn’t resign because he had a family to support. He eventually moved to the editorial side and still works there part-time as a columnist.
“We deal with this all the time,” Butler says, “especially in the poorer regions. I’ve also heard of similar things happening at other media in Argentina and Chile.”
“In every case, the journalist who reported the distressing change to me was shocked that his newspaper would abandon its ethical principles. All said that the sinking economy was to blame. All wished they could resign and look for employment elsewhere, but in the current economic situation, there are no other options.”
John Ullman, executive director of the World Press Institute, acknowledges the problem but points out that even though the Western press is often held as a lofty example to be emulated, it has its own problems.
For example, 40 staffers at the Boston Herald signed a letter of protest recently when the paper hired Virginia Buckingham, a longtime GOP operative and chief of staff to governors Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci, to be deputy editorial page editor.
However, teaching the principles held dear by Western journalists — whether we always follow them ourselves or not — can make a difference.
After attending a 10-week ICJ professional development program for Russian newspaper managers, a journalist, who asked that neither her name nor that of her publication be mentioned, returned to her job at an independent weekly newspaper published in the city of Blagoveschensk, near the border with China. Soon after arriving back home, she faced a dilemma between a practice at her paper and her new-found ethical training. In a tradition that appears widespread in Russia, the paper took payments from local political candidates in return for publishing positive stories, which were labeled as having been purchased.
The journalist discussed the practice with colleagues and mentors on an email list set up after the program. After that discussion she and her coworkers pushed to end the practice. The newspaper only covered politics around election time, and most readers didn't care for the stories anyway, she notes.
Whether the practice has ended for good remains to be seen. But one thing is clear, she says. When the stories stopped, circulation went up.
“As for credibility,” she says, “I think any newspaper is more credible without the paid articles. When a candidate pays money to the newspaper, journalists have a duty to write positive words. But this person can be a bad person.”