Florida TV Station Cashes In on Interview 'Guests' (washingtonpost.com)



Florida TV Station Cashes In on Interview 'Guests'



By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, October 16, 2003



David Morgan, a morning show staffer at the NBC affiliate in Tampa, minced no words when a public relations agent asked how he could get his client interviewed on the program.



'You pay us and we do what you want us to do,' Morgan told him Friday.



What would the segment be like?

'There's a male and female host, a huge studio, leather chairs. We have a kitchen just like the 'Today' show. It's a regular morning show but we do sell segments in it.'

And the fee?



'Twenty-five hundred bucks for four to six minutes.'



Most networks and local television stations have strict rules against pay-for-play journalism. But at WFLA-TV, in the nation's 14th-largest market, producers on 'Daytime' are not shy about asking guests to pony up. They have turned the routine daily booking of guests into a commercial transaction.



Wow. Do they at least tell the viewers what is going on? Well not really:



No mention of payment is made during the interviews. At the end of the show, the words "the following segments were paid advertisements" appear in small type on the screen for about four seconds, along with a listing of the stories.