Last year, NBC held out this lure as it tried to land an exclusive interview with the pop star Michael Jackson: Give us the star and we’ll pay you $5 million.
And we’ll pre-empt a “Dateline NBC” investigation of Jackson.
The proposed arrangement was in an e-mail sent by an NBC executive to the Jackson camp during last February’s heated frenzy among the TV networks trying to land a Jackson interview. The e-mail and the language of a term sheet were revealed Wednesday by The New York Times.
The Feb. 15, 2003, e-mail from Marc Graboff, who identified himself as executive vice president of NBC West Coast, in charge of business affairs for NBC, made the offer of $5 million for an exclusive Jackson interview.
Presumably, the terms were similar to what other networks were offering. But the offer also said this: “Unlike with other networks, the acquisition of the rights to this special on NBC will have the added benefit of pre-empting NBC’s planned broadcast of the one-hour `Dateline’ scheduled for Feb. 17.”
Jackson ultimately made a deal with Fox, and NBC’s Dateline aired a critical report on Jackson on Feb. 17. It looks like the news from that whole episode wasn’t that Michael Jackson has had plenty of plastic surgery. The news was that NBC was prepared to negotiate away its integrity for a Michael Jackson interview.
This wasn’t the first brush with scandal for NBC and “Dateline.” In 1993 NBC admitted that the program had rigged a General Motors pickup truck to explode in a crash test. NBC apologized and settled a lawsuit brought by GM.
NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks told the Times that the network’s entertainment division doesn’t operate under the same rules as the news division. It can pay for interviews. She said the offer to pre-empt the “Dateline” piece on Jackson was only an offer to re-schedule it at a later date.
“Dateline” spokeswoman Caryn Mautner said, “There’s a line between our entertainment and news divisions, and they cannot kill a news special.”
But it looks like that’s exactly what was being proposed. And “Dateline” can’t argue it was kept in the dark; its executive producer was copied on the e-mail.
When the networks offer money to land interviews, either for entertainment or news, they put their integrity into question.
And when they start bartering away what will appear in a news program, well, the question of integrity is answered. How can anyone watch “Dateline” and not wonder if the subject of the next critical “investigation” is there only because he wouldn’t cut a deal to stop it?
