Word: checkbooks
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When CBS News paid H.R. Haldeman a six-figure sum for a television interview, newsmen and others shuddered about such "checkbook journalism." Asked New York Times Columnist James Reston: "Won't other big shots or notorious characters demand their price?" Now the most notorious big shot of all has done just that. Last week David Frost, 36, the British talk-show host and entertainer, announced that he had bought the right to video-tape a series of exclusive television interviews with Richard Nixon, who has granted no audiences to the press since he left Washington a year...
...Frost-Nixon deal carries Watergate checkbook journalism to its greatest extreme to date. After the tempest triggered by its deal with Convicted Felon Haldeman, CBS swore off buying news and thus declined to bid for Nixon. Frost argues that since Nixon is out of office, the interviews are not news but a memoir and therefore immune to the checkbook charge. "There is no reason," Frost told TIME Correspondent Lawrence Malkin in London last week, "why Nixon shouldn't make money from this memoir as other former Presidents have done...
Hale Champion, financial vice president, said the University does not have "any kind of open checkbook" for the Kennedy Library Corporation, Champion said he does not think anybody expects Harvard to put up a lot of money to keep the archives in Cambridge...
Gray Area. The $25,000 or $50,000 question remains: Is checkbook journalism justifiable? CBS Public Affairs Vice President Robert Chandler defends payment for material that is a "memoir" rather than "hard news." Since the '50s, he points out, CBS has paid former Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, Authors Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Walter Lippmann and convicted Watergate Conspirator G. Gordon Liddy to "reminisce" about the past. Argues Chandler, CBS is "paying for memoirs that are the electronic equivalent of a long magazine piece-or a marathon Play boy interview...
Familiar and Exotic. Longtime customers have learned never to cross that Bridge when they come to it, for beneath the beefy, abrasive exterior is a beefy, abrasive interior. Neither the rich nor the famous escape his wrath. He recently demanded that a millionaire yachtsman put away his crummy checkbook, pay cash or get out. Last week a stroller who was killing time before a matinee was loudly condemned as "your typical woman shopper." She retorted with "sexist clod"- but only when she was safely out of earshot...