Pay to Play TV

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 said. "Twenty-five hundred bucks for four to six minutes." Howard Kurtz notes that most networks and local TV 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." While the station's manager "likened the paid segments to an 'infomercial,' the slickly produced 'Daytime' looks like a regular local morning show, with NBC's peacock logo and a 'News Channel 8' insignia at the bottom of the screen."