TABLOID REWARDS' MOTIVES QUESTIONED.

Byline: Iver Peterson The New York Times

It is not the same as posting ``Reward - Dead or Alive'' on the wall of some Old West saloon, but the $100,000 reward offered by The National Enquirer that helped bring an arrest in the killing of Ennis Cosby was only the latest expression of a newspaper tradition extending to the most lurid days of the yellow press.

Indeed, if there is an argument about the news media's offering money for the capture of criminals, it tends to be about motivation. And in the history of newspaper rewards, motivation is in the eye of the competitor.

For example, The Globe, another tabloid, offered a $50,000 reward earlier this year for information leading to the conviction of the killer of JonBenet Ramsey - the 6-year-old beauty pageant princess who was found dead in her Boulder, Colo., home in December - but it hardly gained the favorable attention that The Enquirer got from Thursday's arrest in the San Fernando Valley.

After all, only a week before The Globe made its offer, the paper received intense criticism for having obtained and then printed pictures of the Ramsey crime scene. Although the paper denies it, the subsequent offer of a reward struck its competition, and many others, as an act of contrition.

``What The Globe did, The National Enquirer would not do,'' Steve Coz, editor of The Enquirer, said Friday, basking in the kind of approving publicity that the supermarket tabloids rarely receive. ``Like The Globe, The Enquirer does offer rewards, but The Globe's motives are open to question.''

Not so, said Terry Raskyn, vice president of Globe Communications. ``We were trying to do some good,'' she said. In fact, she added, The Globe had offered $200,000, twice the amount The Enquirer offered, for the same information in the Cosby killing.

``So it's not how much money is in the reward,'' Raskyn said. ``It's who knows what.''

Thursday, the Los Angeles police charged Mikhail Markhasev, an 18-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, with the roadside killing of Cosby, the son of the entertainer Bill Cosby. The arrest was based on a tip that came into the Los Angeles office of the weekly tabloid, one of hundreds of such calls, from someone who claimed to have overheard an admission to the killing.

Coz said the reward would be paid in a lump sum to the caller, who has not been identified, if a conviction is obtained.

Press critics generally disapprove of the news media's offering rewards, because it smacks of self-promotion.

``I think that when newspapers offer rewards it tends to look like a circulation builder and a way to get a little publicity,'' said Sig Gissler, the former editor of The Milwaukee Journal and now a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. ``It tends to contaminate the business.''

It could be argued that The National Enquirer's reward amounted to an extension of its established practice of paying for news and information - the tabloid once paid $200,000 for pictures of Vanna White's baby - because the paper will also get an exclusive ``How We Captured Him'' article from the event.

The public often expects a reward even when none is offered, said Lance Heflin, executive producer of ``America's Most Wanted,'' Fox Television's Saturday night program on real-life fugitives.

About two years ago, Heflin's show, which says it has led to the capture of 453 fugitives in the nine years it has been on the air, got a call from inmates of the Cobb County jail in Georgia. The inmates had realized that someone whose photograph was being displayed on the show was sleeping in a nearby cell after having been arrested on a traffic violation.

``They were fighting with each other to get to the phone, but when they heard there wasn't a reward, they hung up,'' Heflin recalled. After a moment of reflection, however, one of the prisoners called back with the information.