Paying for News?

Many people are indignant that Watergate figures are being rewarded with fat book contracts and lecture fees. But these are not unusual. What of an interview? Is it ever proper for a news organization to pay someone for an interview, especially if he happens to be a Watergate felon? Last week CBS News plunged into the midst of the controversy by admitting that it had paid "in the neighborhood" of $25,000 (perhaps as high as $50,000, said some sources) to H.R. Haldeman, former White House chief of staff during the Nixon Administration, for a 5 1/2-hour filmed interview with Mike Wallace.

Columnist James Reston of the New York Times led the chorus of criticism: "Isn't this a dangerous precedent? ... If CBS will pay this kind of money for Mr. Haldeman, won't other big shots or notorious characters demand their price?"

The uproar overshadowed the issue of the actual value of the Haldeman interview. The network refuses to reveal anything about its contents. But people who witnessed the filming by Wallace and his 60 Minutes crew at Haldeman's home in Hancock Park, the "old money" section of Los Angeles, claim that Haldeman talked "freely and very candidly" about Watergate. Other CBS sources concede that Haldeman was simply putting his own personal interpretation on old disclosures. Haldeman says only that "I was a part of an important historical period that has been grossly misinterpreted and grossly misunderstood, and I saw this as an opportunity of correctly explaining and interpreting it." CBS may air the interview as early as March 16.

Gray Area. The $25,000 or $50,000 question remains: Is checkbook journalism justifiable? CBS Public Affairs Vice President Robert Chandler defends payment for material that is a "memoir" rather than "hard news." Since the '50s, he points out, CBS has paid former Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, Authors Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Walter Lippmann and convicted Watergate Conspirator G. Gordon Liddy to "reminisce" about the past. Argues Chandler, CBS is "paying for memoirs that are the electronic equivalent of a long magazine piece--or a marathon Play boy interview."

ABC and NBC disagree. Both networks turned down the Haldeman offer last fall. Says ABC News President William Sheehan: "A newsmaker should not be paid for an interview, and in this shop H.R. Haldeman is a current hot news story ... Maybe in ten years it would be appropriate to pay for Mr. Haldeman's memoirs, not now." NBC News President Richard C. Wald adds: "It was not a thing I would want to do." Still, both men admit to a "gray area" where they might pay for an interview. Sheehan sees "a legitimate case for this if we are making use of a person's expertise in a non-news situation." Wald concedes that his own network in 1962 bought interviews with the parents of the Fischer quints of Aberdeen, S. Dak., and once paid German tunnel diggers for the right to film refugees escaping from East Berlin. Says he: "I don't want to seem holier than thou."

A.M. Rosenthal, managing editor of the New York Times, calls CBS's "memoir" theory invalid. "They will be presenting this as a news program ... So how do they distinguish between this and an interview with the Shah of Iran?" Reasons Reston: "The danger is that the flow of much important information will be commercialized, and the public will be left with the best interviews money can buy."

Ironically, CBS drafted standards years ago, making a firm distinction between news and memoirs. Haldeman's reminiscences apparently slipped through the guidelines. Moreover, CBS News President Richard Salant ripped into NBC News for the quints deal.

By week's end Salant told TIME: "I'm going to re-examine the whole question and see if I can't redraw the line to get things more precisely back to the standards applied to Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower. I may have slipped here. The last thing in the world I want to do is add to the dangers of having newsworthy people not sit still for interviews in hard-news situations. If I added to that, I'm damned sorry."

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