ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 16, 1997 TAG: 9703170118
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
The National Enquirer's offer may have worked - but at what cost?
It is not the same as posting ``Reward - Dead or Alive'' on the wall of some Western saloon, but the $100,000 reward offered by The National Enquirer that helped bring an arrest in the killing of Ennis Cosby was only the latest expression of a newspaper tradition extending to the most lurid days of the yellow press.
Indeed, if there is an argument about the media's offering money for the capture of criminals, it tends to be about motivation. And in the history of newspaper rewards, motivation is in the eye of the competitor.
For example, The Globe, another tabloid, offered a $50,000 reward this year for information leading to the conviction of the killer of JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old beauty pageant princess who was found dead in her Boulder, Colo., home in December, but it hardly gained the favorable attention that The Enquirer got from Thursday's arrest in California.
After all, only a week before The Globe made its offer, the paper received intense criticism for having obtained and printed pictures of the Ramsey crime scene. Although the paper denies it, the subsequent offer of a reward struck its competition, and many others, as an act of contrition.
``What The Globe did The National Enquirer would not do,'' Steve Coz, editor of The Enquirer, said Friday, basking in the kind of approving publicity that the supermarket tabloids rarely receive. ``Like The Globe, The Enquirer does offer rewards, but The Globe's motives are open to question.''
Not so, said Terry Raskyn, vice president of Globe Communications. ``We were trying to do some good,'' she said. In fact, Raskyn added, The Globe had offered $200,000, twice the amount The Enquirer offered, for the same information in the Cosby killing.
Thursday, the Los Angeles police charged Mikhail Markhasev with the roadside killing of Cosby, the son of the entertainer Bill Cosby. The arrest was based on a tip that came into the Los Angeles office of the weekly tabloid, one of hundreds of such calls, from someone who claimed to have overheard an admission to the killing.
Press critics generally disapprove of the media's offering rewards, because it smacks of self-promotion.
``I think that when newspapers offer rewards it tends to look like a circulation builder and a way to get a little publicity,'' said Sig Gissler, the former editor of The Milwaukee Journal and now a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. ``It tends to contaminate the business.''
LENGTH: Medium: 53 linesby CNB