Corporate media shakedown

Want to Be Interviewed on the Radio? Well, Just Pay Up.
By JACQUES STEINBERG
NYTimes
Published: October 27, 2003

The caller to Joanne Doroshow's office last month described himself as working for Sky Radio Network, a company that produces programming for Forbes Radio, one of the audio channels available to passengers on American Airlines.
As the executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy, a nonprofit organization that casts itself as a champion of consumer rights, Ms. Doroshow was asked if she would be interviewed for a talk show examining the issue of tort reform. When Ms. Doroshow agreed, she said, the caller informed her that it would cost her organization $5,900 to have its point of view heard. When Ms. Doroshow balked, she said, the caller offered to see if it could be reduced to $3,500.
"I was furious,'' Ms. Doroshow said. "I thought this was another way corporations are dominating what people hear, and are getting only their side presented because they're willing to pay for it.''
Ms. Doroshow was so angry that she directed lawyers for the center, whose board includes Erin Brockovich and Ralph Nader, to draft a complaint letter to the Federal Trade Commission, which the center intends to submit today. It asks that Sky Radio, which also produces programming for United, Delta, Northwest and several other airlines, be required to disclose prominently that its news-style programs are actually little more than paid advertisements.
That the regulation of airline audio programming represents something of uncharted territory was underscored by the reaction of a spokesman for the trade commission. When reached on Friday, the spokesman said he was not sure if airline programming fell under its purview, that of the Federal Communications Commission or the Department of Transportation.
In writing to the trade commission, Ms. Doroshow said she wanted to ensure that producers of airline programming - available to three million passengers a month on American Airlines, a unit of the AMR Corporation, according to Sky Radio - were held to the same disclosure standards as Web search engines (which have been directed by the F.T.C. to disclose if a company has paid for high placement) or infomercials (which generally are supposed to announce whether guests have been paid).
Marc Holland, the founder and chief executive of Sky Radio, said that Forbes Radio consists of 30 minutes of actual news content (supplied to Sky Radio by Forbes editors) followed by about 90 minutes of public-affairs programming known as "The Business and Technology Report'' that is assembled by Sky Radio. (The company said it had an arrangement for an audio channel on Delta flights that included news programming from National Public Radio.)
It is this latter part of programming on the Forbes channel that Ms. Doroshow was invited to appear on, Mr. Holland said. And he is unapologetic about the price she was asked to pay. He said that hundreds of companies - " Oracle, Dell, every tech company, most of the pharmaceutical companies, all the big energy companies'' - have agreed to make their representatives available for interviews, for a similar fee.
Last month, the company announced in a news release that it had interviewed its "3,000th client,'' which it said was a tie between an executive from British Petroleum (who had been interviewed about alternative energy initiatives) and a lawyer from McDonald's (who was interviewed about corporate governance). Both had paid to be interviewed, Mr. Holland said.
Because Sky Radio must pay the airlines an undisclosed fee for its airtime and does not accept more conventional advertising, the fees paid by its guests are among its only sources of income, Mr. Holland said. The seven-year-old, privately held company projects revenues of about $5 million this year, he said.
While Mr. Holland said that an announcer intones at several points in the latter part of the broadcast that "the guests on the show may have paid a fee to appear,'' he acknowledged that no such disclaimer appears in the programming guide in the back of the airline's magazine. The only clue that the Forbes programming is separated from the paid programming is a thin line.
Asked if the thin line in the airline magazine was sufficient to distinguish Forbes' independent programming from that of Sky Radio, Monie Begley, a Forbes spokeswoman, said it was.
"It's very clear to me," she said, before acknowledging: "I don't know if it is for a passenger."
To be interviewed free, Mr. Holland said, "you have to be a senator. You have to be a president. You have to be a secretary of state. You'd have to be huge. Or you'd have to have influence with us. It's a gift."
Among the precious few on whom he has bestowed that gift, Mr. Holland said, were former President Jimmy Carter and Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, whose interviews are prominently displayed this month on the Sky Radio Web site, www.skyradionet.com.
Of Ms. Doroshow's complaint that she was effectively being shaken down, Mr. Holland added: "Let them take it up with the Better Business Bureau."

Does this qualify as a modern poll tax since money was ruled a form of free speech?
:grr:

This is just so creepy....

Is there a link??

ON EDIT

Apparently they are not connected, although Sky Radio does do "TV programs" with Tony Robbins etc.

:hi: