A few weeks ago a public-relations firm working for General Motors phoned to ask if I'd say on the media that the buy-back GM was offering its employees was a good deal for them. GM's public-relations firm said they'd offer me money if I did this, as a show of respect. I told them I'd look at the deal and make up my own mind, and I told them to keep their money.
I've looked at the deal and I don't know whether GM's buy-back offer is a good deal for its employees or not. That depends on whether the alternative is a GM bankruptcy, in which case anyone who bailed out early and got some cash would be better off than anyone who held on and got nothing. It's roughly analogous to an over-booked airline offering less money than a seat costs to any ticketed passenger willing to give up a seat. It would be a good deal for the passenger who took them up on it only if the plane never got off the ground.
But I've got to tell you, I did not appreciate getting that call from GM's public-relations firm. I don't want to sound prissy or self-righteous. But it just seems wrong for a company (or its representative) to offer money to someone like me to express a view the company wants expressed in the media. It's one thing to offer an employee buy-out. It's quite another thing to offer an integrity buy-out.
The White House goes around paying columnists like Armstrong Williams for favorable coverage. That's bad enough. But if we've got to the point in this country when big corporations feel free to offer what are essentially bribes to columnists and commentators, we're really in trouble. We no longer have a free press, we no longer have experts you can trust, and the opinions you read or hear every day are worth absolutely zilch.
Almost every big American corporation hires fleets of public-relations and public-affairs professionals who scour academe and the media, looking for people who will use their academic or media credentials to make the corporation's case in public. Some of these people take the money and do the corporate bidding, and they never disclose the fact they've been paid off. Even if they happen to agree with the corporate position on the particular issue they're pontificating about, that's just plain wrong.
I can't tell you exactly how many experts or pundits get paid off. There's no accurate survey of this sort of payola. But I've heard a lot of whispering about it, and a few colleagues of mine in academe and in the media confess privately to having succumbed, at least a few occasions. But public trust in the neutrality of experts and commentators is too important to play with. If everything is for sale in America, then nothing is valuable any more.
Robert B. Reich is co-founder of The American Prospect. A version of this column originally appeared on Marketplace.
