"Go to Kroger and pick up a test kit, then send it to Humana Hospital University to get the results."

That sounds like a line from a commercial. In fact, it’s a tag line from a 15-part news series that WHAS-TV in Louisville, Ky., ran on colorectal cancer. Most often, Jean West, the station’s health reporter, delivered the line. "I really resented it," she says, "the whole project seemed so commercial."

To most journalists, the separation of news from advertising has been as basic a rule as the separation of church from state. But a new trend in broadcasting is making that separation less clear. Smith Kline Clinical Laboratories can take credit for what representative Michelle Barnes refers to as "the formula." It works something like this: A TV station teams up with a hospital and a drug chain to promote a mass community health screening. It can be for cholesterol, colorectal cancer, vision, glucose or even drinking water.

The benefits of this form of newsmaking are clear: The test kit manufacturer sells a lot of kits. The drug chain, which buys and distributes the kits free or for a nominal charge, gets publicity and customers into its stores. The hospital, which processes the kits, also gets publicity, and usually referrals. The television station gets kudos for community involvement and can forge relationships with advertisers. And TV viewers get screened inexpensively for a health problem.

The colorectal cancer screening that West worked on makes a good case study, since, as Smith Kline’s Barnes says, "We have done this program 300 times, in almost every market there is. "In some markets, as many as 200,000 test kits were distributed. That puts a lot of money into Smith Kline’s coffers. It also saves a number of lives.

Larry Smith, news director of WHAS television, says, "I initiated the series here. I had it forced on me in South Bend, where I worked before, and resisted it for all the reasons people here resisted it. But the program turned out to be a lifesaver."

"How can it be unethical to make available something that saves lives?" he asks.

West wasn’t the only WHAS employee who resisted Smith’s plan. The anchors of the 11 PM news found ways to run out of time for the story. Once, Smith called them during the broadcast and demanded they run the colorectal report. By the time he wrote the above memo, Smith says he was "thoroughly pissed that they’d dropped the ball. We do things here by a written plan, and no one was following the plan."

Smith points out that WHAS made no money on the project, and predicts that TV stations will be doing a lot more of these screenings in the future. "All the research regarding successful TV news operations shows that stations involved with the community have a leg up on confidence and viewer support," he says.

But are these series public service, as Smith claims, or "news-mercials," as another journalist has dubbed them?

Philip Meyer, an ethicist at the University of North Carolina, is not disturbed by the trend. "Journalists assume that if someone is making a buck, something’s wrong. This is not always the case."

"If the object of news is to give people information so they can better their lives, what can better a life more than saving it?" he asks. "The ethical problem would be advertising disguised as news. That would put your credibility at risk. But there was no deception with this series."

Dr. Tom Cooper of Emerson College points out that to evaluate the ethics of a situation, ethicists look at "who can be helped, and who can be hurt." In this case, "who can be hurt is less obvious," he says. The danger is that "as soon as a precedent of veiled advertising is set, then other forms of it can become acceptable.

Other questions Meyer and Cooper suggest considering are: Is there a better test kit available? Could the time spent on this series be better spent on another public health issue that doesn’t happen to have a sponsor?

News director Smith is not bothered by these questions. "You could make this argument about everything we do."

Ethicist Meyer expects to see more of these partnerships between advertising and editorial. "In this age of information overload, it’s harder to get people’s attention. Advertisers are all looking for weird new ideas."

And the health screening "news-mercial" is not likely to disappear. Barnes says that only once has she been turned down flat. "The major objection I get," she says, "is, ‘Well, we’re doing a cholesterol in May. We just don’t have time for this right now.’"

If you call the newsroom of tiny public radio station KCHU in Valdez, Alaska, you hear this recording: "… KCHU Valdez can no longer afford a news person. If you have a news tip, call the Alaska Public Radio Network."

The station has been hovering near bankruptcy, due to the cost of covering the wreck of the tanker Exxon Valdez and the resulting economic and environmental disaster. "There was chaos everywhere and we were swamped with calls from news organizations across the globe," said station manager/news editor Dave Hammock.

Responding to the crisis, the Alaska Public Radio Network immediately flew reporters and engineers to Prince William Sound to bail out network member KCHU’s besieged staff and to file daily reports for the network.

But in mid-April, KCHU announced that its remaining annual budget would be exhausted within a month. Other larger public stations that had assumed costs for coverage were also feeling the pinch.

A Fairbanks legislator, spurred on by his aide, a former public radio newsman, introduced legislation for a $32,000 emergency appropriation. Lawmakers from the Prince William Sound area "suggested" oil lobbyists look into the situation and Exxon officials, perhaps hoping to improve their oil-blackened image with Alaskans, called KCHU with an offer hard to refuse: a $32,000 grant to the network for oil coverage.

Because APRN executives were on vacation, a network secretary filed the Exxon check and newspapers reported APRN had tentatively accepted the grant. The public was not pleased. After two frantic days of long distance phone calls between Alaska and vacationing APRN board members, a final decision was made - thanks, but not thanks to Exxon’s offer.

"We have strict underwriting guidelines that say a corporation cannot pay for coverage of a particular situation or event in which they figure." said Diane Kaplan, network executive director. If Exxon had offered money for general news coverage or for a particular regular news program we would have accepted it. There’s no way that grant would have influenced our news coverage at all, but even public perception of a conflict of interest is as bad as the real thing."

KCHU station manager Hammock believes the guidelines are not realistic. "KCHU is supported essentially by state and local government funding; 85 cents of every state dollar is oil, 93 cents of every city dollar is oil. Who’s kidding whom about not taking oil money?" Hammock says.

The station expects to be back on its feet soon. Response from public fund raising has been phenomenal, the Valdez City Council has given money for the station’s rent and utilities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting promises an unprecedented one-time grant.

The Alaska legislature is expected to allocate generous funding to APRN for oil spill coverage - money to be reimbursed by Exxon.

Interview a rich, famous, beautiful movie star? Not a bad assignment, right? Not bad at all.

When Larry Conley, editor of Memphis magazine, asked me to profile Cybill Shepherd, a Memphis native and star of the late TV show "Moonlighting", I knew it was a plum assignment.

But as I was to discover, there’s a dark side to success such as hers: Everybody wants a piece of the rich and famous, and some will pay big money to get it. Before it was over, I was tempted by that big money myself.

Although I’m a part-time staff member of Memphis magazine, I accepted the Shepherd assignment as a freelancer and retained rights to the finished product.

As it turned out, Shepherd was remarkably frank in the interview, going into special detail about her battles on the "Moonlighting" set with producer Glenn Gordon Caron and co-star Bruce Willis.

The resulting profile ran in the March 1990 issue of Memphis magazine. Soon after, USA Today ran a one-line mention. A few days after that, Ken Neill, the publisher of Memphis magazine, got a call from The National Enquirer. Having seen the USA Today blurb, an Enquirer editor offered to buy reprint rights to the story. Neill told him I owned the rights.

Without offering advice, Neill informed me of the call. Fifteen minutes later, I was talking to the Enquirer. The editor there said he hadn’t read my story himself, but, relying on the opinion of one of his reporters, he offered me $600 for the right to reprint parts of the Shepherd profile.

I told him no. I explained that Shepherd had agreed to sit for an interview with Memphis magazine, not The National Enquirer. I told him that both my credibility and that of Memphis magazine would be jeopardized if, after someone agreed to do an interview with us, they found their words published elsewhere. We might lose future interviews, I said, and it would also break an implied promise every writer makes to an interviewee — namely, that the interview will appear where she expects it to appear.

I then pointed out that the Enquirer could certainly do a story about our story, without paying me or Memphis a thing. The editor said that’s what they would probably do, after they consulted their lawyers about how much they could quote. That ended our conversation.

I felt very high-minded at this point, but the fact is, I had already contemplated selling reprint rights to the Shepherd profile to a respected New York magazine, and I had never considered the ethical issues involved. I’m not sure I ever would have if the inquiry hadn’t come from the notorious Enquirer.

Over the next few minutes I called several friends to brag about myself. One asked if I couldn’t try to get Cybill’s permission to sell reprint rights. I replied that Shepherd had already expressed her disdain for certain "supermarket" tabloids. Besides, I said, I wouldn’t put her on the spot that way. Should I sell her out for $600 or not? She shouldn’t have to decide.

That wasn’t the end of it. About an hour after our first conversation, the Enquirer editor called me back. He had now read my article himself. He said it was terrific. (He was a nice man, with good taste.)

He offered me $5,000 for reprint rights.

I gulped, broke into a sweat, and grew dizzy. Then I said, No, if it was wrong for $600, it was wrong for $5,000.

Then he said, "Do you have a price?"

Gulp. Sweat. Swoon. "No, I guess not," I said, trying not to think about it too hard.

He said he understood, then asked if he could interview me for the story they would do about my story. I agreed. When we were through, he offered to pay me for being interviewed. At first I said okay, since if I’d written him a story about doing the interview, I’d expect to get paid. Later, I changed my mind. I called him back and told him I didn’t want a fee for the interview. It smacked of checkbook journalism, I said. It also still meant trading on Shepherd’s relationship with Memphis magazine.

Everyone was mighty proud of me. Ken Neill and Larry Conley thanked me for protecting the magazine’s reputation. Shepherd’s secretary thanked me for not selling Cybill out to the tabloids.

My 15-year-old son said, "You did what! You could have bought me a car with that money!" Oh, well.

In the March 27, 1990, issue of The National Enquirer was a full-page story entirely about my interview with Cybill Shepherd. It was a fairly accurate account with proper credits given. Neither I nor Memphis received a penny for it.

Knowing what I know now, would I still consider reselling the Shepherd interview to another magazine? Yes, but only after asking Shepherd’s permission and only if I thought she might consider it good publicity (if it was a magazine she respected, for example). Would I have sold the article to the Enquirer if they had been willing to reprint the whole thing verbatim, or if they had given me control over the final product? No, not without Shepherd’s permission.

Would I write an article for money about my Shepherd/Enquirer experience? Yup. You’ve just read it.

Just how far does one go to please an advertiser? For publications like The New York Times or Sports Illustrated, it’s an easy call. If the advertiser doesn’t like something, well, there are other advertisers waiting in line. But what about the smaller paper or weekly that doesn’t have advertisers queueing up? Are the rules the same? Should they be?

In January, 1989, I was editing a small hockey weekly in the Twin Cities, Let’s Play Hockey. The paper, which has been in business for 18 years, covered the hockey scene in Minnesota, concentrating on youth hockey. Now, understand that youth hockey is close to a religion in Minnesota. (About 100,000 attend the state high school tournament every year, for example.)

A regular feature of the paper is a cover picture. The picture doesn’t necessarily lead to a story inside the paper.

My photographer, Linda Cullen, came in with a shot of a game being played outside. The picture had all the desired elements — youths hacking away and having a good time, a puck, the right sun balances, etc. The picture ran on the cover and I thought little of it. That is, until the publisher, Doug Johnson, called me into his office. He had the hockey picture cover sitting on his desk.

"What’s wrong with this picture?" Johnson asked, pointing to it.

I looked hard.

Did we misidentify a player? Nope.

Did we get the names of the teams wrong? Nope.

Too many shadows? Nope.

Johnson tapped the picture. "Look again."

"I just don’t see the problem," I said.

"It’s the sticks," he said. "They’re the wrong kind. They’re Titan sticks. Titan doesn’t advertise with us. Christian Brothers is really mad and is threatening to cancel their account."

Christian Brothers is a well-known stick company in northern Minnesota. It has run an ad on the cover of the paper from the first day of publication.

I looked at the picture again. It was difficult to read many of the stick names but the Titan stick did stand out.

But the publisher wasn’t done. He pointed to the helmets. They were the wrong kind, too. "We have to help our advertisers," Johnson said. "We can’t go around showing pictures of brands of equipment that don’t advertise with us."

"Wait a minute," I replied. "You can’t manufacture the news. A picture can’t be manufactured like that."

"We’re a small paper," he said. "You have to compromise sometimes. After all, it’s only a picture."

A few days later, Johnson told Linda to shoot a certain college player who was wearing the proper helmet, using the right stick, skates, etc. She didn’t, and to the credit of the publisher, he said nothing.

The uneasy year went on. At the end of the year, we parted company. At the end of the most recent season, he let his second editor go, saying, "Editors are a luxury."

In the last year I’ve often thought about the picture incident. Had I been unrealistic? A fifty dollar ad in a small weekly can actually mean more than a thousand dollar ad to a daily.

But does that give the advertiser the right to try to dictate the news?

I don’t think so.

The advertiser can argue for best placement available. And, that the more the ad runs, the better the ad should look or, maybe, the better the discount. There’s nothing wrong with any of these.

I’m not holding my nose up in the air and declaring that newspapers are above making money, but it gets down to a question of public trust. We abuse it when we allow an advertiser to determine what the reader sees even if it’s a picture on the front page of a hockey weekly.

The advertiser has the right to express an opinion, but the editor must have the right to reject it. The editor cannot let decisions regarding money stand in the way of a story. Maybe that’s easier for an editor to say because rarely does one have money behind a news operation.

If the publisher wants to overrule the editor, that’s his call. But the publisher should remember this: Once you have given in to an advertiser, you have set a precedent that will be hard to change.

. . . Your April newsletter insinuated that "Miller Time," the main headline on the front page of the March 8, 1991 Philadelphia Daily News, was nothing more than a promotion for Miller beer.

The slogan "Miller Time" entered the vernacular a long time ago. That headline, a reference to our coverage of the first joyous troops returning from the Persian Gulf, was in the finest tradition of Daily News headlines. It provoked a smile and recognized common emotions.

. . . The news editor who wrote the headline had no idea that a Miller High Life promotion appeared deep inside the newspaper. (Editor’s Note: An ad on page 28 of the same issue promoted a contest sponsored by Miller High Life and the Philadelphia Daily News.)

It amazes me that a publication supposedly about journalism ethics failed to call us for our side of the story. And I think it was FineLine’s obligation to point out that the reporter who wrote the story works for a competing — albeit related newspaper.

See Is it news, ad or infomercial?

The channel is tuned to Philadelphia’s KYW-TV and the warm voice of a local television medical reporter invites viewers to ponder a serious matter of the heart. Their own.

For the next sixty minutes, the hosts of a special prime-time television show called "Health Test" lead viewers on an exploration of heart disease and health tips. They interview recovering patients from Albert Einstein Medical Center. They seek advice from cardiac specialists at Albert Einstein Medical Center. And occasionally the host rattles off a telephone hotline for questions: (800)-EINSTEIN.

So answer this "Health Test": Is this news? Is this a commercial? Is this the future?

"The entire program is produced with our involvement from start to finish with our doctors, our patients. We certainly have thrown out ideas. Some were taken, some fell flat," said Annemarie Armstrong, director of public relations for Einstein, the program’s sponsor. "I have not seen any other television station come together in quite this way, but given the economics of television, perhaps it will change. I do think we are on the leading edge."

Given economic pressures, television, magazines and newspapers have been casting for new forms of revenue and in that struggle ethical standards can become elastic.

For the industry of information, the present state of the economy is quite possibly the worst in two decades.

Newspaper executives watched the advertising market ebb after the 1987 stock market crash and then dry up in 1988 and 1989 as recession began to take hold. For traditional television, the story was even bleaker: loss of momentum, market share and money.

As a result, media are focusing on ways to expand the old advertising base and in some cases cozier relationships between content and advertising have developed.

Some of it is clearly beneficial for the struggling companies. Some of it is not so clearly beneficial for the consumer who is expected to distinguish advertising from news.

It’s not always easy to see through the blur of business.

Omni, a consumer magazine on science and technology, devoted its November cover to first-time advertiser Motorola although the picture had no connections to the stories inside. Through a cut-out window of the cover, shined a silver hologram of a hand gripping a telephone. The pitch was the future of global communications.
In the euphoria after the end of the Gulf war, the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News splashed its cover with "MILLER TIME — First Wave of Troops Back Home from Gulf." On page three, a local columnist declared the victory celebrations: "Miller Time, USA." On page 28, an advertisement appeared for a cash contest sponsored by the Daily News — and Miller High Life.
The Miami Herald floats the idea of selling advertising space to companies that want to run verbatim news releases.
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission filed six complaints against television stations that blended news formats with advertising in an increasingly popular hybrid — infomercials. Typically, the infomercials followed familiar and trusted news formats: a consumer self-help program, a talk show, a documentary, a news magazine.

The FTC’s most serious complaint involved a $1.5 million fine against Twin Star Productions of Scottsdale, Ariz., which was selling "Foliplexx," a baldness remedy, "Y-Bron," a male impotence treatment and "EuroTrym," an appetite suppressant patch endorsed by Ronald Reagan’s son Michael. The FTC charged Twin Star’s product claims were unsubstantiated and the infomericals misled viewers by masquerading as consumer shows rather than paid advertising.

"Some of these firms use the infomercial as a way to hide the fact that they are selling something and to give the sales effort more credibility than it deserves. That’s when it gets bad," said Herbert Rotfeld, an associate professor of marketing at Auburn University in Alabama. Rotfeld and Patrick Parsons, an assistant professor of communications at Penn State University, launched a study of more than 1,000 television news managers to determine the ethical divide between advertising and news.

Their research showed the gap was as wide as the Snake River Canyon; anything could be rationalized.

"They were aware of the ethical difficulties associated with these infomercials and had misgivings about running them. But ultimately they ran because the economic pressures overcame their concerns and often the concerns were rationalized away by saying the consumer can tell infomercials — we have an obligation to our stockholders," said Parsons.

Rotfeld said he interviewed or received survey answers from more than 1,000 people, including cable news executives and television station managers. Everyone believed they were dutifully following universal standards, he said. But no one was.

"I talked to different television stations in the top 100 markets," Rotfeld said. "One says, ‘It’s our responsibility to look at these very closely; we won’t accept things that look like news.’ Later, talking to a comparable officer in a similar station: ‘We’re not in a top-50 market, we basically take everything except autographed pictures of Jesus Christ."

The blend of news and commercials dates back to a change in federal guidelines in 1984. The Reagan administration dropped a requirement that limited the time television stations could devote to commercials. That spawned home shopping networks that are 100-percent advertising along with half-hour and hour-long infomercials. Generally, such shows were confined to the ghetto of early morning hours on cable and UHF broadcast channels. But lately they have started to proliferate on regular broadcast television.

"The whole nature of television has changed from free outlets to VCRs, to satellites. So you have to change the way you do business," said Jerry Eaton, former chief of programming for KYW in Philadelphia and now head of KYW-TV Enterprises, a new division designed to create programming for individual advertisers.

"It’s a different relationship between client and advertiser and television," he said. "My goal is to marry the needs of advertiser with the needs of the viewer."

Recently, Eaton’s division shot a pilot for a new half-hour program dubbed "On-Sale." It’s a talk show format aimed at shopaholics and features bargains from local businesses that pay for the publicity. The show does not have a scheduled debut date yet, but there have been public reports that it could replace the station’s floundering noon news, the 5:30 p.m. newscast or both.

The same division has also created two hour-long medical shows sponsored by Einstein Hospital and hosted by a medical reporter who appeared in the station’s regular newscasts.

Eaton said producers have to be open with viewers about the programming by airing tag lines. "There’s no percentage in fooling the viewer," he said. "There’s nothing sinister about it. It’s useful to viewers and useful to advertisers."

But there were no tag lines for the station’s first "Health Test" show although announcements were made about the hospital’s sponsoring role.

Keith Love, a Los Angeles Times political reporter turned corporate executive for the McClatchy Newspapers chain in Sacramento, argues that a new appreciation of advertisers is not entirely unhealthy.

"The newspaper business has finally woken up to the fact that they cannot take these things for granted," said Love, who is an assistant to the vice president for operations at McClatchy.

That may mean running travel section stories about cruises during the same season when people can actually board the ships and advertisers are running their promotions, according to Love.

"But if any advertiser gets the sense that a paper is for sale," Love warned, "then you’ve given it away."

For a response from Philadelphia Daily News Editor Zachary Stahlberg, see "Letter to the editor."