Renting the fourth estate; why won't the George Wills and Sam Donaldsons disclose the speaking fees that have made celebrity journalism such a growth industry?

Renting the Fourth Estate

Why won't the George Wills and Sam Donaldsons disclose the speaking fees that have made celebrity journalism such a growth industry?

Within the genteel caste system of Washington journalism, the Periodical Press Gallery at the Capitol is a bracingly democratic institution, where well-known journalists like Newsweek's Eleanor Clift share the membership rolls with the rank-and-file from Communications Daily and Food Chemical News. For magazine and newsletter journalists covering the Hill, gallery membership is a necessary privilege. Gallery credentials entitle the holders to brush past Capitol security, observe Senate and House debates from the press gallery, and have phone messages taken for them by congressional employees. Keeping watch over the gallery is an elected Executive Committee of Correspondents, whose primary mission is to make sure the passes don't fall into the hands of lobbyists and other influence-peddlers.

In December 1988, the gallery erupted. Depending on who you talk to, the issue was professionalism, privacy, or the First Amendment. The trouble started when the Executive Committee issued new disclosure forms requiring the 1,500 members to list the sources (not amounts) of their nonsalary income, including honoraria for appearances on government-funded broadcast programs like Voice of America and fees for speeches to industry groups, labor unions, and lobbies. Congress had handed down the disclosure rule years before, and the committee, concerned that gallery journalists were earning more and more of their income from honoraria, voted to enforce the measure. But a lot of gallery members didn't much like the idea. By the time the dust had settled, four members of the committee had been ousted--their seats filled by dissenters--and the revamped disclosure form had been chucked out the window.

The outside fees controversy reached a boil last April, when Eleanor Randolph, the Post's media reporter, wrote a front-page story revealing the speaking fees of many of Washington's most sought-after journalists. The public learned that the $2,000 honoraria then routinely accepted by congressmen were peanuts compared with the speaking fees landed by their critics in the Fourth Estate. David Gergen of U.S. News and World Report took home up to $5,000 for speaking to groups like SRI International and United Technologies Atlantic & Pacific Advisory Councils; commentator Patrick Buchanan pulled in $10,000 for each of "24 to 30" speeches a year; Time's Hugh Sidey and columnist Jack Anderson reportedly earned $10,000 a pop; for the Post's David Broder, a speech to the American Stock Exchange was worth at least $5,000; William Safire of The New York Times made $18,000 for a single speech to Southeastern Electric. What Randolph didn't point out, however, was that the speaking fees trickle down to lesser-known journalists, who may give only a few talks each year but are as open to potential conflicts of interest as their more renowned colleagues.

Many journalists didn't take kindly to the scrutiny they received last winter. Morton Kondracke, a New Republic writer and a regular performer on the "McLaughlin Group," scoffed at the honoraria debate in a TNR column. Kondracke, who refused to reveal his own earnings, condemned financial disclosure for journalists as "an exercise in voyeurism and an invasion of privacy."

Kondracke's response pointed to the heart of the matter, but never reached it. Of course voyeurism alone could never justify the intrusion of disclosure, in the same way it could never justify riffling through a senator's checkbook. But there are other, more legitimate considerations at work that demand the disclosure of journalists' outside income. Journalists, like senators, are people with great influence; and journalists, like senators, are people--and therefore subject to temptation and influence. As is the case with politicians and industrialists, private interest money can bend the work of journalists in inappropriate ways--not necessarily through overt quid pro quos, but more subtly, particularly through the enticements and distractions of fame. So why shouldn't the subtle force fields of power and influence analyzed so closely in politics and government be mapped in the case of journalists too? In journalism, such influence can make columns and broadcasts less truthful. And surely playing with the reported truth can be a greater evil than playing some of the political games that journalists attack so vehemently.

Sure, Kondracke was ticked-off. You'd be mad too if people automatically assumed that anyone who paid you owned you. But Kondracke's anger blinded him to something important: The very thing he doesn't like done to him, he blithely does to politicians all the time. Just a few months after defending himself on honoraria, Kondracke wrote a story in which he criticized Lloyd Bentsen for wanting to charge business lobbyists $10,000 a head to have breakfast with him--a perfectly legal activity, although one that would have created apparent conflicts of interest. It seems never to have occurred to Kondracke that there was nothing wrong with Bentsen sharing a breakfast table with a lobbyist as long as nothing was going on under it. Where was all Kondracke's righteous anger about unfair assumptions when they were applied not to himself but to a politician?

No sting for the WASPs

A point raised by disclosure's opponents and proponents alike is that journalists are not government officials. As Post National Editor Robert Kaiser puts it, "I'm not prepared to accept a total equating of us and them. We're not elected. We're not living on public money. We have no state power to exercise." Tell that to Richard Nixon.

Kaiser's paper drove a president from office. Though journalists have no "state power," they do possess awesome power of their own. Sure, Ted Kennedy can vote on a product liability bill that could make or break the Widget industry; but Ted Koppel can wreak equal havoc on the Widget-makers by focusing a Nightline episode on the hazards of this year's model. It's not necessary to conjure up hypothetical cases. Ronald Reagan could never have denied Gary Hart the Democratic nomination and turned him into a laughingstock; the Miami Herald did it in one weekend. And when reporters lie down on the job, society suffers. Evidence of widespread corruption at HUD was available for years before the press finally gave the problem full treatment. Who can doubt that today's tough coverage has accelerated the government's HUD investigation?

Bafflingly, many of the high-profile journalists I spoke with denied that journalists have much power. (Robert Novak and James J. Kilpatrick were particularly adamant on this point. Kilpatrick's disclaimer is remarkable, since in his role as an anti-integration editor at the Richmond News Leader he almost single-handedly delayed by several years the extension of civil rights to Virginia's blacks. A more telling assessment came from Patrick Buchanan when, arguing against the propriety of sex on television, he told "Crossfire" viewers, "The suggestion that this powerful medium doesn't influence behavior is absurd.") Even if journalists don't cop to their power, the organizations that hire them to speak are aware of it. The American Association of Retired Persons, the formidable old-folks lobby, has booked ABC News correspondent Carole Simpson for a June convention in Orlando. The topic of Simpson's speech? "The Media's Impact in Shaping Public Policy." The AARP refused to disclose the fee.

For some reason, journalists accept the idea that they are the kind of people insulated from money's subtle influences even though they wouldn't buy that line from, say, the president of the United States. The unspoken argument is that some people are just above that sort of thing. It's an attitude shared by "classy" people everywhere--from politicians like James Baker to members of the New York literati.

Virtually no press criticism was aimed at the elegant and WASPy Baker while he was making decisions as treasury secretary regarding Third World debt that protected his multimillion dollar holdings in Chemical Bank. Compare that performance to the way rough-hewn Bert Lance was ridden out of town for much more paltry banking sins.

And some years ago, when it was pointed out to Jason Epstein that the magazine he founded (The New York Review of Books) ran a disproportionate number of reviews of titles published by the firm of which he was vice president (Random House), he responded not with a simple explanation but with a torrent of famous authors' names and a question: "Do you understand how deeply your article offends those writers?" The subtext of Epstein's reply was: Literary people are special. By contrast, wouldn't Epstein immediately think the worst in a similar case involving public officials or, ugh, paving contractors? Maybe he could easily have explained away the apparent impropriety in his situation. But why should he think that he, unlike these less elegant types, was above being questioned about it?

National Suppress Club

There's nothing inherently corrupting about imparting wit and wisdom to the AARP, or anyone else. But, like congressmen and publishers, journalists aren't immune to money. The case of R. Foster Winans--the Wall Street Journal writer who got $31,000 (and eventually 18 months in jail) for keeping a broker apprised of the upcoming subjects of his influential column--comes to mind. As does the case of the hundreds of journalists who flew to Disney World for, essentially, a luxury vacation at Disney's expense--and then wrote favorable stories about it. And despite snippy comments made by some reporters who jetted to Morocco at Malcolm Forbes's expense, how many of them will ever write a meaningful tough story about him?

Like Baker and Epstein, a journalist should have to confront hard questions about an apparent conflict of interest; in order to ask those questions, the rest of us need to know when that appearance exists. But while journalists will assume the worst as they hound a Bert Lance to the ends of the earth at the slightest whiff of scandal, most still bristle when you want to chat about their finances.

For a clear example of this double standard, how about this: Rowland Evans and Robert Novak's twice-yearly forums usually feature several government officials--this year's roster included Speaker of the House Thomas Foley. Because such officials fear the power of these columnists, they're typically afraid not to come, and they're afraid to accept a fee. So they come for free. You can't say the same for Evans and Novak--they get a fee all right, and they won't tell you what it is.

That attitude is earning Washington's journalists a reputation for hypocrisy. In swearing in the new president of the National Press Club recently, Senator John Glenn asked, "Do you pledge that you and your fellow journalists will continue to demand that all politicians get no pay raise, reveal their incomes, and stop taking honoraria--while steadfastly, sanctimoniously refusing to do any of those things yourselves?"

Money talks, everyone talks

Despite the possibilities for wrongdoing presented by honoraria, the truth is that the great quid pro quo--for the case of a journalist who sold his soul for an honorarium--is pretty much a red herring. Cases in which the appearance of a conflict actually reflects wrongdoing are infinitesimally rare; a lot of the time, trade associations and the like invite bigname journalists not out of sinister motives but merely because they think the journalists are the kinds of speakers their members want to hear. That's probably why in my research on honoraria, I couldn't find a real conflict. I did find one apparent conflict, which I'll get to in a moment.

Journalists try to use this paucity of troubling cases of conflict of interest to torpedo the idea of disclosure. "Where's the crime?" asks Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. "Habeus corpus, baby. Where's the body?" Of course, there's something fishy about this argument coming from any journalist who's against disclosure. After all, if you don't tell me about your apparent conflicts, how can I determine which ones are real?

Although few actually sell out in order to deliver a group's party line, journalists are hardly immune to committing sins of omission, leaving out details or even whole stories as a result of their paid association with these organizations. The pressure on journalists to trim their sails this way is real: According to Joe Cosby, head of Cosby Bureau International, one of the "top five" speaking bureaus in the nation, "It is not unusual for an industry group to say about a journalist, `This person did an article that is not favorable to our industry. We don't want him.' We hear that a lot."

But a more general effect of honoraria on the Washington press corps has been the creation of a new class: the celebrity journalists. Over the past 20 years, journalists have learned to pump up their speaking fees, not by pandering to different trade groups, but by pandering to television.

Although reporters have accepted speaking fees for decades (remember Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner?), the major rise of journalist honoraria is associated with the invention of the tie-clipped microphone, as George Will's career attests. Will made his mark as a columnist during the Watergate scandal with tough and insightful commentary on Richard Nixon, but he made himself a celebrity on the pundits' roundtable, "Agronsky and Company," by skewering opponents with baroque one-liners. The New Republic reported in 1986 that Will earned between $12,000 and $15,000 a speech for an estimated 40 speeches per year. Most estimates place Will's annual income at $1 million or more. (Will did not return several phone calls.)

An entire school of journalists has mimicked Will's two-step approach to inside-the-Beltway stardom: Make a big enough mark in your column to secure TV appearances; make a big enough mark on TV to secure far more lucrative speaking jobs. Suitably, the best term for this practice--"buckraking"--was coined by The New Republic, where several buckrakers mold their office hours around their camera calls and speaking engagements.

With a few exceptions, the journalists who command the highest speaking fees are familiar faces on shows like the "McLaughlin Group," "Crossfire," and "Washington Week in Review." Following Will's model, the newcomers to buckraking know that a $250 or $500 appearance on a TV panel may lead to a $5,000 speaking fee. "McLaughlin Group"ies Kondracke and Fred Barnes regularly take their TV personas on the road, recreating their ornery made-for-TV debates before packed houses. Hard work made Barnes and Kondracke prominent journalists; television made them stars.

It also made them hot commodities for Cosby Bureau International. "They do a marvelous job," says Cosby, who books the Kondracke-Barnes debates. "Maaaaarvelous."

Last year, Cosby's firm dispatched 130 speakers to more than 1,000 conventions, seminars, and conferences around the country. David Brinkley, R.W. Apple, Ed Bradley, Jack Germond, Kondracke, and Barnes are on Cosby's roster of speakers-for-hire. As are Joyce Carol Oates, John Tower, and Bud McFarlane. (That Barnes and Tower--the journalist and the public figure he has covered--can be rented through the same bureau is yet another odd feature of celebrity journalism.) The journalists' fees range from $4,000 to $25,000, their customers from the Washington Antique Show to IBM. On the morning of our interview, Cosby had been dealing with a "big Boston financial group" who wanted ABC's Pierre Salinger to spice up a private meeting. Salinger's rate: $25,000 plus a ticket on the Concorde to fly him in from London.

Not just any journalist is welcome in Cosby's stable. "We have people that are clamoring to do this, and we can't do anything for them," he says. "We are a celebrity lecture bureau."

Cosby is not forthcoming when asked what his celebrities make, but he gushes when asked what makes a celebrity. "It's name recognition," he explains. "There are only five well-known quarterbacks at any given time. There are 25 journalists who are known well at any given time. A journalist has a longer lifespan than a quarterback."

Celebrity journalists may not fret about knee injuries, but they do have to hustle to keep on top of their game. That would be fine--except that the standards for achieving and maintaining fame are not necessarily the standards for producing good journalism. Suppose that a major Washington figure is sued by a former female employee for verbal and physical sexual harassment. Further suppose that there is enough substance to her charges that the powerful figure settles the suit for a six-figure sum. If the man in our lawsuit were a senator, there would be a pool of reporters camped outside his house and sifting through his garbage; but the lawsuit really happened and the man was not a senator but John McLaughlin. Now quick, how many stories about the episode have you seen? Could it be that there's this consensus silence because Washington is lousy with would-be celebrity journalists who would sooner cover Interior than hurt their chances to someday get on "McLaughlin Group"? And could it be that journalists avoid doing tough stories about their peers because they fear tough stories in return about themselves? In short, even though most Washington journalists are just as much public figures as the senators they frequently sit in judgment on, hardly any of them want to be judged that way.

Celebrity status affects reporting. James Doyle, a veteran Washington correspondent who is now vice president of the Times Journal Co., recently unearthed evidence of this when he polled a slew of Washington journalists for a piece in Neiman Reports One unnamed columnist confessed to Doyle that TV and speaking engagements gradually altered his (or her) journalism. "Last year I made more than my salary in speech fees," the columnist wrote. "Most of the speeches arise from long, familiar tenure on a television panel show .... As for my column it is less and less about my area and more about national affairs that are right for the television show and speeches .... It is quite possible that the net result is a wider gap between me and my readers."

The confession is telling. To sustain celebrity status, journalists change their roles as reporters. This influence shows up in other ways as well. Shows like "Crossfire" demand a Left versus Right framework for issues that's increasingly cliched. On TV panels like McLaughlin's, vital issues of the day are given the sort of thumbs-up, thumbs-down treatment people expect from Siskel and Ebert. And if you want to come off on TV as an expert, you'd better skip the thorny pros and cons of Social Security and instead discourse on the latest Gallup Poll on Social Security or today's vote on the Social Security bill. That's why chat show discussions tend to revolve around the politics of an issue, rather than the issue itself. The show reduces journalism to sound bites--the very practice journalists often deride when the soundbiter is a politician.

In other words, celebrity journalism degrades the whole realm of political writing by injecting it with extra doses of TV-caliber superficiality. The main impact of this on journalism is a general decrease in intellectual honesty and careful reasoning. Maybe that's why most celebrity journalists have such a hard time dealing thoughtfully and logically with the issue of honoraria. Here's Robert Novak's "analysis" of the issue: "I'll tell you what it is. I think it's a fantasy of little weenies around this town, who can't hardly pay their rent and who are a little bit jealous." Thoughtfulness and logic just are not highly valued when the little red light goes on.

In my research, I did come across one apparent conflict of interest: David Whitman, a senior editor at US News and World Report, seemed to have adopted a more conservative bent in his reporting on homelessness after he accepted an honorarium for a panel discussion held by the Heritage Foundation. But when I called Whitman up, it didn't take him long to convince me that the money hadn't warped his viewpoint: for one thing, he informed me that the fee was only $250; for another, he directed me to a story he had written before he spoke at the Heritage Foundation that displayed the same bent.

Whitman didn't suggest for a moment that he was angry to be asked about his fee. "I've charged liberal groups for speaking to them, too. If I have to prepare a speech, which takes me time, I feel I ought to be paid an honorarium," he says. "As you can tell from the fact that I've told you all this, I also don't feel that it's terrible to disclose who I get money from."

Ban the ban

Ideally, that's how disclosure would work: some nit-picking watchdog, sifting through the public record, detects an apparent conflict; he calls it to the attention of the journalist or his editor; the conflict is explained away, and the watchdog, slightly sheepish, concludes the interview; or, if the conflict isn't adequately explained, the journalist is hung out to dry.

Sounds simple, but no one's doing it. Accepting speaking fees from interest groups without disclosing them is still routine at most news organizations with Washington outposts, including the Miami Herald, the Richmond Times Dispatch, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, and The New Republic. Typically, before committing to an outside appearance, most journalists must get permission from their editor or bureau chief, and they can't take fees from organizations or individuals they cover. BusinessWeek and the National Journal are alone among the Washington media outlets in forbidding the practice. U.S. News & World Report has been reconsidering its laissez-faire honoraria policy for the past six months.

The top brass at The Washington Post are in a similar quandary. Richard Harwood, the Post ombudsman, says he has devised a cure: banning speaking honoraria entirely. Kaiser, the paper's national editor, says the Post still hasn't decided what to do but insists that a total ban on honoraria is not one of the options on the table.

It shouldn't be an option. Virtually any relationship between journalists and others can create the appearance of conflict of interest to those who don't adequately understand what's behind that appearance. So to say that honoraria are never acceptable is, in effect, to side with the ill-informed. It's always possible to conclude the worst about a reporter covering the president who decides to attend a White House dance or a reporter on the Treasury beat who buys Savings Bonds. But does this mean the first man should turn down all such invitations or that the second should stay away from all such investments? No, it only means that reporters have to be prepared to own up to their deeds. It's the George Wills with their secret White House connections (Will helped prepare Ronald Reagan for the debates in 1980 and then on television commented favorably on Reagan's performance, never letting on that he'd had this inside role) and the James Bakers with their hidden financial commitments who should draw our criticism.

For a more sensible solution, Kaiser, Harwood, and the rest of the top management at the Post might look to their own Federal Page. The page regularly runs an "Honoraria Scorecard" that charts the honoraria--amounts and sources--accepted by a rotating roster of congressmen and senators. The idea is that readers can decide for themselves if their leaders are being bought.

You don't have to equate Morton Kondracke with Alan Cranston to see that the same sort of disclosure would be good for journalism. The Periodical Press Gallery's disclosure policy was the right idea, but the gallery was the wrong forum. Journalists should not be policed by the government; they should be policed by their readers. News organizations should annually disclose the amounts and sources of honoraria to the public--an honoraria scorecard printed in the publication or kept in an accessible file at television and radio stations would serve the purpose well. There's just no good reason not to make this information public.

Certainly the celebrity journalist's desire to play the double game of pretending to be an ordinary person subject to only ordinary pressures, while secretly raking in huge sums from all sorts of sources, is not a good reason.

Reporter or flasher?

Sam Donaldson gave away a big piece of the antidisclosure game when he told Jonathan Alter that disclosing his income would hurt his credibility as "the guy in the trenchcoat." That's the whole point. Donaldson isn't just an average reporter in a trenchcoat; making over a million dollars a year affects your outlook on life and could affect your reporting. Sure, disclosure might be embarrassing for Donaldson, but why should famous journalists, unlike other stars, be able to enjoy the benefits of celebrity while suffering none of the costs?

By making journalists more vulnerable to public scrutiny, universal disclosure would not only tend to deter conflicts-of-interest; it would also deter the more insidious effects of the buckraker culture. Celebrity journalists, aware that their readers know the details of their heavy moonlighting schedules, might feel obliged to put a little more time, thought, and kick into their reporting and columns.

On the forms she filled out for the Periodical Press Gallery during its brief reign of disclosure, Newsweek's Clift listed appearances on "The McLaughlin Group," three appearances on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's television show, participation in a panel before the National Federation of Business and Professional Women, four speeches made to the Congressional Youth Leadership Council, and eight appearances on the United States Information Agency's roundtable "America Today." These outside activities take away from the time Clift can dedicate to her primary responsibility--reporting. Readers (and editors) deserve to know how thin she's spreading herself.

Once subject to mandatory disclosure, some journalists will completely forgo honoraria they would have accepted before. (That's why they're objecting now to the prospect of disclosure.) Aware that the details would be published, Deborah Norville probably would not have read "news" about tobacco sales plans and interviewed company "guests" for a Phillip Morris sales conference in Hawaii.

But disclosure would place an equally heavy burden on the rest of us. While it's fine to let our suspicions be aroused when David Whitman accepts a speaking fee from the Heritage Foundation, we owe him the respect of listening to his explanation, presuming the mere appearance of a conflict of interest until it's proven to be the real thing.

So, through disclosure, buckrakers will be deterred and villains will be caught--or, more likely, opportunistic villains will be denied their opportunity. But maybe there truly are no real conflicts of interest. And maybe celebrity journalists can bear the burdens of stardom without lowering their standards for reporting and writing. Perhaps the public will have its confidence in the media boosted by the discovery that, as some buckrakers insist, journalist honoraria in no way compromise reporting. Either way, the profession--and the public--wins.

Michael Willrich is associate editor of Washington City Paper. Bill Yelverton provided research assistance for this article.