Chrysler: If you can find a journalist for sale, buy him

You might recall the 1980s Chrysler ads where then-chairman Lee Iacocca challenged buyers: “If you can find a better car, buy it!”

A post from Jalopnik site suggests Fiat-Chrysler has a new line: “If you can find a journalist for sale, buy him.”

Automotive News journalist Nick Bunkley noted that the company, at a media event unveiling its five-year plan, put documents on Samsung Galaxy tablets for journalists to take – or, if the journalists’ ethics would not allow, let them donate the tablet to Detroit city schools. As Bunkley tweeted: #ethicssmethics.

The ethics of automotive journalism can be tricky, given the jumble of issues related to access to vehicles for review, the power struggles between the industry and journalists, and the billions of ad dollars spent by the industry. It’s indeed a love-hate relationship.

Having said that, of course it’s unethical for people who cover a company to accept anything of real value from that company, and a $300 tablet is both something of real value and completely unrelated to the requirements to write about the company.

The concern here is with Chrysler for making the offer.

The company knows that many of journalists who cover it have corporate or personal (or, we hope, both corporate and personal) obligations to accept nothing of value. The reasons are obvious — real bias by weak-willed journalists swayed by swag, or the perception of bias by news consumers who believe that journalists are weak-willed and swayable.

Simply making the offer created a multifaceted ethical dilemma:

• If you take the tablet and work for an online site, do you have a legal obligation under Federal Trade Commission guidelines to tell readers that you accepted the tablet?
• Does Chrysler have an ethical or legal obligation to tell those blogging journalists who take the tablet that they may have entered into a commercial relationship with the company?
• If you take the tablet, have you harmed a student who otherwise won’t have access to a tablet that Chrysler would have donated?
• If you don’t take the tablet, is it really a “donation” in the first place? (My choice to follow my company’s ethics rules does not mean I’ve done anything noble by donating a tablet to charity.)
• If you don’t take the tablet, do you have the obligation to tell readers that you turned down the offer — but others writing about it took the tablet. (The “accountability” section of the SPJ Code of Ethics, for example, tells journalists to “expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.”)

My advice to Chrysler: Let journalists do their jobs without having to make decisions that have nothing to do with the task at hand. It creates a further divide among “journalists” and people using journalism for their (and your) ends, and confuses the public between that distinction. And uncouple the connection between a tablet giveaway to journalists and a charitable donation to schools, which makes it look like you’ll only donate when it doesn’t meet your other purpose of buying coverage.

Or to be even more cynical, Chrysler can change the words “the British journalist” to “the auto journalist” in Humbert Wolfe’s poetic ditty from a few decades ago.