NBC needs to address lavish gift to source
Today, the SPJ Ethics Committee criticized NBC News for giving a free jet ride to a source while covering the source’s custody battle.
For a story by Multichannel News, NBC has defended itself. The story says the network issued a statement, but I couldn’t find it posted anywhere.
So far, media critics for The (Baltimore) Sun and the Orlando Sentinel said they agree with our position that checkbook journalism, as this was, is wrong.
Tags: checkbook journalism, NBC
December 29th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
NBC was the only network to pick up this story and follow it to its conclusion. The father, David Goldman, has done a remarkable job in getting his son’s ordeal heard in the courts, media and anywhere someone will listen. I applaud NBC for giving David and Sean the opportunity to be together with limited media exposure for the first few hours of their reunion. I view it it as a very compassionate act. Leave NBC alone.
January 12th, 2010 at 3:51 am
I’d suggest that the reason “NBC was the only network to pick up this story and follow it to its conclusion” — if indeed that’s the case (no other network ever covered the story?) — was because NBC branded the story with its corporate logo … and, in the case of the flight home, its money. Others shied away, to the extent that they did, because it was not really an NBC news story; it was an NBC crusade, a promotional “feel-good” entertainment story.
NBC defends its corporate involvement in the final major news development in this saga — the flight home — by saying that it had a prior relationship with David Goldman, who had appeared in 17 segments of the Today show in less than a year. I wonder what further news developments they uncovered in, say, appearances 15, 16 and 17. I also wonder how many times Sean Goldman’s Brazilian family appeared on Today and whether they, too, were flown to New York at NBC expense. And I wonder how that prior relationship clouded NBC’s news judgment and skewed its coverage.
I certainly would have liked to hear more of the Brazilian family’s defense. If NBC’s reports had been genuine news stories and not part of a crusade, we would all have received more fairly presented and dispassionate news stories, and the network would not have provided financial underwriting of the story’s final chapter.
Finally, I wonder why NBC isn’t here to defend its ethical judgment and procedures. Why have they not responded to SPJ’s news release? If they issued a statement responding specifically to the points raised in the SPJ press release, the public and other professional journalists would be able more fairly to evaluate the propriety of the network’s underwriting of a news story.