My diary for June 8, 1990 reads: “2pm, Inn on the Park hotel. American TV interviewing me for documentary on Rudolf Hess. Allow for three hours’ filming.” Then after this in angry red ink I have written, “Terrible argument over my request for payment of £250 for my interview. Producer says all American TV companies have banned ‘cheque book journalism’. What a joke!”
All that summer, the American documentary producer had pursued me around the world. She had telephoned me several times in London “to pick your brains” on various theories about Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who had suicided--or been murdered--in Spandau prison, Berlin three years earlier. A couple of months after the first call, she rang me twice in Australia, once at 3am--”Sorry, we couldn’t work out the time difference.” The good news was that the programme was definitely going ahead. The crew would be flying to Berlin and then would be coming to London. Could I hold myself free to do my interview some time in June?
I have to admit that not once during all these calls did I say, “By the way. What will my fee be for all this? Do you want to negotiate directly with me or would you rather talk to my agent?” I did not do so because I had no doubt that they would be as generous as I had been with my time.
On the actual day of filming--confirmed and reconfirmed--I turned up early and met the producer, the presenter, and the crew. I sat in the hotel suite’s reception area while the crew fixed lights and microphones around me. The presenter, a handsome young man in an Ivy League suit with black silk socks and gold buckle shoes, remained in the bedroom while all this was going on and emerged only when the producer announced that everything was ready for him.
He crossed his immaculately-creased trouser legs and fired a series of carefully-prepared questions at me. In response I gave him the results of twenty years’ research on the Hess affair, topped off with some original theories I had developed as a result of that research. With some re-shooting and some cutaways it all took about two and half hours.
Everyone said that they were delighted and the producer escorted me to the lift. On the way I said, “I can’t remember if I’ve given you my address for the cheque.” She looked surprised. “Oh, we don’t pay for interviews. That’s cheque book journalism and the network forbids it.”
While lifts came and went she then explained at length that, yes, American television networks had once paid for interviews. Then during the Watergate scandal, President Nixon had complained that people attacked him on TV only because they were being paid to do so. So the network bosses had issued an edict--no more payment for people being interviewed for news or current affairs programmes.
“Wait a moment,” I said. “Let me raise two points. You wanted me on your programme because of my expertise on Hess. That expertise has a market value. Why should you get it for free? Next, I am a professional writer. I gave up half a day of my writing time to appear on your programme. Everyone else in that hotel room today was being paid for their time except me. Yet without me, they would have had nothing to do.”
She thought for a moment or two. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Half a day. Let’s say two hundred and fifty pounds. Why don’t you submit a fake expense account for trains and taxis and things that adds up to two hundred and fifty pounds?”
“Hang on,” I said. “I’m an investigative journalist. I expose people for fraud. And you’re asking me to make out a fraudulent expenses account? Forget the whole thing. I withdraw my permission for you to use the interview. I’ll send you a lawyer’s letter tomorrow confirming this withdrawal.” Then I walked out. The producer telephoned next morning to say that the cheque was in the post and it was.
I should emphasize that this was the first time I had been forced to argue with a TV current affairs programe about the principle of payment for my appearance. All British broadcasters including the BBC, pay for experts’ interviews--not only on current affairs programmes but also on news programmes. The fee can be as little as £15--two minutes on the World Programme of BBC radio--to £50 for five minutes on BBC2-TV’s Newsnight. The BCC, for heaven’s sake, even pays authors to appear on radio or TV to plug their own books.
I have gone on at this length to put paid to the nonsense written in Australia recently about cheque book journalism and the Jana Wendt’s Uncensored programme. Wendt and the ABC, you will remember, caught a lot of flack because some of the people she interviewed in her show, Germaine Greer among them, were paid.
This was not cheque book journalism. How does journalism come into it? Greer is a star. Why should she give up her time to be interviewed by Jana Wendt, who is being well paid for asking the questions, to appear for nothing on a programme for which the ABC is paying the production company a lot of money?
Once again it would be a case of everyone in the studio being paid except the one person without whom there would be no programme. There might be a case for not paying Greer if she had just written a new book and had asked if she could appear to talk about it. But the supplicant in this case was the producer and the reality of the commercial world is that the supplicant pays.
In Britain, France, Germany--all over Europe in fact--television pays people for interviews whether they be for news, current affairs, chat programmes or documentaries. If they want you, they pay, and the more desperately they want you, the more they pay. A colleague of mine tells TV producers when they telephone “just for a chat”--but really to see if they want him on the show--”I’m happy to chat with you but I have to warn you that the meter is already running.”
I know this is not the case in Australia and this is why Australian television producers have a reputation in Europe as being the meanest, stingiest, tightest, most sanctimonious Scrooges in the business. They will do anything to get you for free. If you insist on payment, they will whinge about cheque book journalism, tiny budgets, unfavourable exchange rates, your duty to share your knowledge with the viewers or, failing all else, the old “Aussies together against the rest of the world” routine. Unfortunately this sort of behaviour obscures important issues about payment for information and confuses readers and viewers about what really goes on in the media world.
I need to confess at this stage that I can find no watertight definition of “cheque book journalism”, no rules that do not turn out to have exceptions, and no clear dividing line between when it is right to pay for information and when it is not. In fact, I have rewritten this article three times trying to do so. Here are the problems.
At its simplest level cheque book journalism is paying money to someone who has newsworthy information which they will not reveal without that payment. No journalistic code of practice or code of ethics that I know of specifically forbids this. In Britain, the Press Complaints Commission says editors should not write cheques for witnesses in current criminal proceedings because this might influence the evidence that those witnesses might give.
Nor, says the Commission, should editors write cheques for convicted or confessed criminals, on the grounds that they should not benefit financially from their crimes. Both these restrictions seem both obvious and just but even here the Commission makes an exception--”unless there is a legitimate public interest at stake involving matters that the public has the right to know.”
Take the best-known piece of investigative journalism of our times, Watergate. What if “Deep Throat” had demanded payment for the information he gave Woodward and Bernstein? What if they had met his demands? Surely the stories that brought down a President were so important that if the two Washington Post reporters had paid “Deep Throat” a million dollars it would have been worth it. As I write there are stories in the British press that the BBC had considered paying the five youths in the Stephen Lawrence case to appear and be questioned on television. This must be wrong. But what if during the interview one of the youths broke down and confessed? Or they produced proof that they were innocent? Then payment would have been justified... and quickly forgotten.
It seems to me that it is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules about cheque book journalism because journalism is an anarchic calling, and the journalists themselves neither know beforehand how the story they are chasing will work, nor what the effect of its publication will be. In the end, whether you have paid for the information or not, what counts is the quality of the article and the best judge of that is the reader-- not other envious and jealous journalists.
Look at what happened to Gitta Sereny, a serious historian fascinated by dark personalities and society’s attitude to them--see her works on Speer, Hitler’s architect, and Stangl, commandant of Treblinka death camp--when she published earlier this year “Cries Unheard,” her second book about Mary Bell.
Back in 1972 Sereny wrote a highly-acclaimed account of the trial of Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl convicted of the “manslaughter because of diminished responsibility” of two small boys one aged three, the other four. Sentenced to life detention, she was released twelve years later. Sereny kept in touch with the Mary Bell case so knew that even before Mary Bell had served her prison term, newspapers were offering her enormous amounts of money for her story. Mary Bell refused them all.
Then in 1992 Sereny approached Mary Bell and suggested they write a book together, one which would have the twin aims of enabling a now adult Mary “to take issue with herself”, and put pressure on the authorities to reform the system for dealing with children who commit serious crimes. Mary said no. Three years later, after the death of her mother, she changed her mind and approached Sereny. Sereny says, “I decided that as she now wanted to speak, if she didn’t do a book with me, then she would probably do something for a sensational tabloid that would be quite inappropriate and we would never get to learn what we needed to know about the case.” Contracts were drawn up, publishers approached and eventually Macmillan’s offer--a substantial one--accepted.
Sereney says, “Right from the beginning I said that since Mary Bell was going to be working with me for months on end that she would have to have some of my money. This was arranged between Macmillan and Mary Bell’s agent.”
How much was it? Sereny feels that she does not have the right to reveal the financial details of Mary Bell’s arrangement--”this is Mary Bell’s affair.” The Guardian claimed that the amount was £50,000, later amended to £15,000. Sereny says that neither figure was correct. Work on the book went on throughout 1996. The whole project had to be kept secret because Mary Bell had a daughter, eleven years old when the project started, who is protected from media identification by a stringent court order. The Official Solicitor had insisted that therefore there should be no announcement about the book until the eve of publication. Then--and only then--could the victims’ parents be informed.
But someone leaked the book’s subject to The Observer and its issue of 19 April carried a piece under the headline “Disgust at story of Mary Bell, the child killer”. The media editor, Richard Brooks, had not only broken the news of the book but--without checking with Sereny--had telephoned the parents of Mary Bell’s victims and told them about it in order to get their reaction.
This sparked off a sustained attack on Gitta Sereny the like of which has not been seen since Salman Rushie wrote The Satanic Verses . The theme of the criticism was that Sereny had enabled Mary Bell to profit from her killings, that the payment to her was cheque book journalism, “blood money”, that Bell was an innately evil person who had manipulated Gitta Sereny for her own ends, that a murderer should be silent and Sereny had given Bell a voice. Yet, at this stage, no one making these criticisms knew what was actually in the book because--in accordance with the requirements of the Official Solicitor--no copies were to be printed until just before the agreed publication date, then still two weeks away. None of Sereny’s critics had therefore read it, including the the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who said that for Bell to profit was “evil”.
By the time serious reviews appeared--”What a difference reading the book makes” . . . “Cries Unheard is one of this year’s handful of necessary books” . . . “Read this as a catalyst for change”--it was nearly too late. The book’s message had been in danger of being buried in an avalanche of attacks based on the mistaken premise that this was cheque book journalism. It wasn’t. Yes, money was paid to Mary Bell but the Press Complaints Commission later ruled that this was permissible because “there was a legitimate public interest at stake involving matters that the public has the right to know.” The Commission accepted that the project was a collaboration between a victim of a cruel childhood and an outdated legal system and an author of proven integrity so as to force society to face what had been done in its name.
The book reveals that Mary Bell had been abused by a prostitute mother who had repeatedly tried to kill her as a baby and a toddler, and who forced her between the ages of four and eight to take part in sex with her clients. Then during her twelve years in detention she was emotionally manipulated in prison by the very officials supposed to oversee her rehabilitation. The book shows her to be a highly-intelligent woman, an insightful person who had paid her debt and now wanted to face what she had done, understand it, and make a new life for herself and her daughter.
Calling into question a whole range of issues about child crime and punishment, it is a book of seminal importance that was caught up in media hysteria finally fuelled more by the so-called serious broadsheets than the tabloid press.
Why? We can only speculate. Envy? Resentment? Perhaps they were annoyed that Sereny, a colleague, refused to talk to them about the book, not understanding that she was under legal obligations not to do so. Perhaps they thought that the book--which none of them had read--was sensationalist and that Sereny had “sold out” for fame and fortune. Perhaps the general “dumbing down” and popularising of the serious press in Britain made them feel that they had to scoop the tabloids when an opportunity arose.
But suppose Cries Unheard had turned out to be a bad book. Would it still have been all right for Mary Bell to have been paid? Here intent is paramount. Why did Gitta Sereny want to write this book? Because she knew it could be a major work, in keeping with her other books, and a factor in the eventual reform of British law. Her intent was to inform, educate and campaign. Even in a criminal trial, motivation is a key issue. Shouldn’t a journalist be allowed to put forward his or her motivation in defence of a story for which money has been paid?
What about the two nurses who were convicted in Saudi Arabia of the murder of their Australian colleague? Both sold their stories to newspapers on their return to Britain. The newspapers which paid them argued successfully that since the nurses claimed their confessions had been given under duress and that they were actually innocent and not criminals, that this was a matter of public interest--a reasonable argument. But since the nurses story was sold at auction to the highest bidder we have to conclude that money was the major factor that motivated the nurses’ to sell their story and it cannot be seriously argued that the newspapers which bought it did so as part of their campaign to reform the Saudi Arabian legal system.
This was cheque book journalism and it got the papers which entered the bidding, money at the ready, into a nice ethical tangle. All the papers who made offers knew that if they were successful they would have to be prepared to argue that the nurses were innocent. But those who did not offer enough and missed out on the story, then turned on the nurses and argued instead that they were guilty. So cheque book journalism had had a direct effect on the editorial stance of the newspapers, and impartial assessment and analysis of the case went out the window.
Does it matter? The truth is that some of the best journalism--if you dig a little behind the scenes--turns out to have a cheque book element to it. In an ideal world everyone who gave information to journalists would do so for altruistic motives. But life today is not like that. Information is a valuable commodity and in a market-orientated world journalists sometimes have to pay for it. The important thing for journalists is to be discerning and approach each case on its merits.
The Sunday Times could not have exposed the thalidomide scandal if the editor, Harry Evans, had not been prepared to write not just one cheque but two. The first was for £2,500 (then about $7,000) to a Swedish lawyer. He sold the newspaper copies of documents that the German police had seized from the manufacturers of the drug, which was marketed in the 1950s as a safe cure for morning sickness but which caused some 8,000 deformed births around the world.
The second cheque was for £8,000 ( about $20,000) to a British consultant pharmacologist who gave the newspaper the internal documents of the company which had marketed the drug under licence in Britain. The two sets of documents, plus a lot of investigative work on the paper’s behalf, enabled it to launch a campaign to reform the way drugs were marketed and the way the law on personal injury compensation was implemented, and eventually to win better compensation for the victims of the drug.
The Sunday Times campaigned to have the tax laws changed so as to bring one of Britain’s wealthiest families, the Vesteys, into the tax net, after the Vesteys had successfuly avoided millions of pounds in personal income tax through the use of overseas trusts. It could not have done so if it had not written a cheque for £5,000 (about $12,000) to an academic who had spent years researching the hundreds of companies which made up the Vesteys’ international empire.
On a more personal note, in 1993 I paid a Soviet air force general £2000 ($5,000) for the story of his role in the Cuba missile crisis 30 years earlier. I needed his recollections for an article I wrote as a freelance for The Independent. I weighed the criticism that payment could attract against the public interest in knowing just how close the world had come to a nuclear Armageddon. I paid a former KGB colonel £500 for a copy of the file of Sidney Reilly (of “Reilly Ace of Spies” TV fame), including Reilly’s prison diary and photographs of him in the KGB morgue after he had been executed. There was no way he was going to give me the file without payment so I had to weigh accusations of cheque book journalism against the public interest in learning how the KGB was able to brainwash people into confessions without physically harming them. All good value for money.
But I did not pay the British spy Kim Philby a single kopek for six days of interviews in Moscow in 1988 because I told him that if I paid him I would have to announce it and then no British newspaper would print the story--”blood money to British traitor”. Philby understood. Nearing the end of his life, he wanted to justify himself and money did not matter. His employers, the KGB, wanted to celebrate the successes of their master spy. I wanted the British public to understand what had made Philby a traitor and how the system had facilitated his treachery. But, looking back on it, if the attitude of the British press at that time had been different and Philby had asked for money I would have paid him and pleaded the “public interest” defence.
I know that one result of all this is that media organisations with the deepest pockets will get the best stories. In Britain it is well-known that the Mail organisation and the Murdoch group pay the most and the Guardian and the Independent groups the least so anyone with a story to sell--unless they are ideologically motivated--goes to the Mail and Murdoch. You cannot buck the market.
In the end I have decided that I am more for cheque book journalism than against it. I suggest that other journalists suspend their blanket disapproval of the practice and treat each case on its merits and recognise that on this point, the readers are probably the best judges. And let us not forget that this is the great information age. Why should journalists alone be banned from trading in it?
While my colleagues ponder this, I intend to go on practising cheque book journalism, but, as always, with some discrimination. In fact I have an offer of US$5,000 out in Moscow at this very moment for the KGB files on Vladimir Petrov. If anything comes up you’ll be able to read all about it here--providing the publisher’s cheque for me is big enough.
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