AMY GOODMAN: As we move now into our last segment, I’m looking at Monday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times, an unusual front-page piece, special report, “Crossing the Line: A Business Deal Done — A Controversy Born.” And it says, “Ten weeks ago, The Times devoted its entire Sunday magazine to coverage of Staples Center, a sports arena and entertainment venue that opened a week later in downtown Los Angeles. Subsequently, when it became widely known that The Times had agreed beforehand to split the advertising profits from that issue with Staples Center, the paper — and the entire journalism community — was rocked by controversy.” Again. I’m reading from the front page of the Los Angeles Times about itself.

It goes on to say ”Times editors and reporters, including those who worked on that issue, said they had not previously known of the profit-sharing arrangement, and they and their colleagues in the editorial department complained angrily that the arrangement had threatened their integrity and severely undermined The Times’ credibility.”

It goes on to talk about 300 Times journalists signing petitions and then presents a section, an entire section of the newspaper, special report, “Crossing the Line.” To say the least, highly unusual. The report criticizes Los Angeles Times publisher Kathryn Downing, who knew about the arrangement, and the editor, Michael Parks, who found out about it before the magazine was distributed, but didn’t stop publication or inform reporters. And the Times distributed new guidelines for employees on safeguarding editorial independence. Among the guidelines, the Times will not engage in any dealings with advertisers or other groups that require or imply coverage or restrict it in any way. Nor will the Times sell sponsorships of its news and feature content.

We’re joined right now by one of the angry Los Angeles Times reporters who helped craft the deal and this special section. Henry Weinstein is with us, legal affairs reporter for the L.A. Times. He’s been with them for 21-and-a-half years and is one of the organizers of the protest. In the studio with us here in New York is Steve Rendall, who is a senior analyst with FAIR, the group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, and co-host of the radio program CounterSpin.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Henry Weinstein, how did you find out about what was behind the Los Angeles Times Magazine issue called “Taking Center Stage” about the Staples Center arena?

HENRY WEINSTEIN: Good morning, Amy.

Well, I found out about it when my New York Times arrived at my home on October the 26th and I read an article in their business section by Felicity Barringer, which described that we were — and had that the newspaper executives had signed this profit-sharing deal. And I was absolutely aghast. And I went into the paper that morning, and people started talking about it and saying how upset they were and, you know, sort of trying to figure out what the appropriate response was, and lot of discussion about it. And then there was another story the following morning in The Wall Street Journal.

We had decided that day to circulate a — to circulate a petition, you know, protesting and demanding some accountability. And the petition was circulated on October the 27th. And I had been involved in some other petitions circulating there about things in the past, but never anything like this, where people were signing so fast. There was clear unanimity that this was an awful thing and something had to be done about it.

And then, the following day, the management had a mass — we had a mass meeting in the cafeteria, where we let them know in no uncertain terms that this was just totally unacceptable behavior, that they had, you know, thrown the newspaper’s credibility at issue. I mean, a fundamental premise of journalism is that a journalist should not be sharing revenue or have a business relationship with someone that he or she is writing a story about. In fact, the paper’s own code of ethics for reporters specifically forbids this. So, what we saw in this deal was that the people who run the newspaper had done something that just flagrantly violated our own rules, as well as kind of the basic covenants of journalism.

AMY GOODMAN: How did it happen?

HENRY WEINSTEIN: Well, the way that it happened was that, as far as we can tell, I mean — and we know a lot more now, after David Shaw’s long story — is, is that there — you know, that at the end of 19 — a year earlier, that the paper had gotten into this agreement, along with 10 other large corporations, to be what are known as, quote, “founding partners” of the Staples Center, a place that will have, you know, basketball, hockey. You know, the opening event was a Bruce Springsteen concert. And, you know, in return for paying a certain amount of money, the Times has the right to exclusively distribute newspapers. There are signs shown up there. It has a kiosk or so on. But there was one — and that was all kind of — that part of it, however one thinks of it, is fairly traditional kind of, sort of civic boosterism activities.

But what was different about this was, is that there was a clause in this contract that said that there would be additional revenue opportunities, where they would share — or, over a period of time, that they would engage in some joint endeavor. And over a period of time, it evolved that what the revenue-sharing endeavor for the first year would be, would be this special magazine. Now, our Sunday magazine, over recent years, has not been doing well. It loses a few million dollars a year. And it’s usually, you know, maybe 30 to 40 pages. And this magazine was 168 pages — never seen anything quite this big — and that was because there was a huge amount of ads sold. And then, we didn’t find — there were a number of us that were sort of puzzled by sort of how big, you know, that the thing was. And then we found out, of course, that part of the reason it was was that the Staples — you know, people from Staples had played a role in selling the ads.

And, you know, as I said, the publisher had not told people that she had done this. And as you also said at the start of the program, though, that our editor found out about this, you know, during the printing process, and at that point, he faced, it seemed to us, you know, one of two choices: Either he could have killed the thing — and, in fact, the former editor of the paper, Bill Thomas, said in this Shaw article this week that it should have just been killed — or at the very least, he should have — he could have made some kind of a disclosure, both to the staff and to the readers, that what they were reading was a product that was done under a highly unusual circumstance, that, you know, as I said before, you just don’t share revenue with a news source. I mean, you know, people were starting to call up some of our political reporters. “What does it take? What do I have to pay you to get a story on the front page?” A newspaper can’t be in a situation like that.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Weinstein, a legal affairs reporter for the Los Angeles Times for more than two decades. I should say that we called the Los Angeles Times management and asked them to join us, and they said that it wasn’t an important enough news story, and they wanted to move on from here. Steve Rendall, how unusual is it to, one, the Los Angeles Times to have done what they did originally, which is to make this profit-sharing arrangement, and then, two, to publish an entire section which attacks management, that is done independently by the reporters and editors who were not involved with this?

STEVE RENDALL: Let me start off by applauding Mr. Weinstein and his colleagues, who, when they found out what was going on, did the right thing and signed petitions and such. There were other editors, people on the editorial side at the Times, according to Mr. Shaw, that learned this information earlier and didn’t act upon it.

But this is an exceptional case. I would caution against making too big of an exception about it. It’s a little bit like a correction. Some people say corrections, when they run, they serve the purpose of making people think that everything else that was in the paper the day before was correct. The idea that the L.A. Times has not, in my view, crossed the line before is not true. In fact, David Shaw provides — I think that’s one of the really interesting things about this article, is in the back of the article he provides all sorts of other recent episodes. He misses a couple that we’ve caught at FAIR. For instance, last year, the L.A. Times participated in a PR day. It was a day thrown by the PR industry in Los Angeles in order to introduce PR professionals to Los Angeles Times reporters and editors in order that they could get better media placement. Now, we’re all for community outreach on the part of newspapers, but what they have to do is outreach to people and not corporate constituencies, especially those that are experts at getting media placement, to begin with.

But I think, “Is this exceptional? Yes, it is.” Profit sharing is exceptional. Being founding partners in stadiums, as I’m sure your listeners have heard before with Joanna Kagan and Neil deMause, this is a regular, regular practice, where newspapers join with stadiums and with sports teams to become founding partners. That’s improper, as well. But I would caution — I would say, yes, this is an exceptional case, and a lot of attention should be called to it, but there are these sorts of situations all over the place.

I would point out that even before this era where newspapers are in crisis, where their readership is dropping, and MBAs and hot shots from business sides are being brought in all over the place to try to build — to try to build up their revenues again, the wall — the idea that there’s a wall, a wall like that between church and state, between editorial and business, that notion has always been imperfect. I mean, we have to understand, newspaper revenues, 80% of newspaper money comes from advertisers, only 20 from consumers or the readers. There’s always going to be a threat of pressure from the business side to the editorial. So, even when it was imperfect — before, it was even imperfect. Now we’ve got all these new pressures with lower readership and with these hot shots being brought in.

I mean, who are these people? Who is Kathryn Downing? She had never been — she had been — apparently worked in publishing of legal publications before. Mark Willes, who had been for years at General Mills, he gained, after a short time at the L.A. Times, the moniker of “the serial killer,” because of his approach to publishing. And, I mean, here’s a guy that wiped out one of the best local newspapers in the country. He closed New York Newsday.

A system — I guess I just have to get back to, if you’re going to operate with this imperfect system, the wall, that they call this, the wall between church and state at newspapers —

AMY GOODMAN: Advertising [inaudible].

STEVE RENDALL: — you have to have the people on the business side that understand the traditions and the principles behind it.

AMY GOODMAN: Harry Weinstein, your response? Henry Weinstein?

HENRY WEINSTEIN: Oh, I find nothing to disagree within what Mr. Rendall has said. And that’s one of the reasons at some papers, some of these things are done informally, I mean, in terms of that over a period of time, people that are on the business sides of newspapers, you know, come to have an understanding of what they can do and what they can’t do.

But in a situation like this, and in particularly a situation where you have a chief executive officer who was talking about basically creating some kind of new paradigm, there were a number — you know, saying that there should be much more contact between the business and editorial people, I think it created an atmosphere where, you know, some people felt there was license to do things that were clearly, clearly improper. I mean, as Shaw said in his piece, that this was a — that this colossal blunder occurred because of deadened sensibilities and diminished standards.

And one of the things, you know, that we have to do, obviously, is to — you know, is to stiffen the standards. And I think that we’ve done some of that. I agree with Steve that there has historically been, from time immemorial, you know, battles between advertising people and editorial people at newspapers. There’s no question about that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we only have 10 seconds to go, and final comments, Steve Rendall?

STEVE RENDALL: Yeah, I just think we have an emerging culture in a lot of newsrooms where journalism and ethics seem to be slipping away from each other. A recent survey in Editor & Publisher showed that more than 50% of publishers believe that what the L.A. Times did with Staples was OK, was acceptable.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, I want to thank you both for being with us, Henry Weinstein of the Los Angeles Times and Steve Rendall of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. That’s www.fair.org. That does it for today’s show. We also encourage you to call in with your ideas about the most important issues of the century. We’ll be running those comments next Thursday. Our number is 212-209-2999, 212-209-2999. Democracy Now! produced by David Love, María Carrión and Karen Pomer; Errol Maitland, our technical director. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.