for their stories, and everybody will insist on compensation. Where will it stop?" In Britain, the weekly magazine OK! not only pays celebrities for interviews, it lets them review and approve all photos and articles before being printed. And in the U.S., news magazines are known to offer similar deals with celebrities in order to get exclusive interviews. Newspaper editor David B. Cooper has acknowledged the dangers of paying for stories: The frantic, competitive ratings race in television has spawned a wave of awful stuff passing for journalism. Fairness and substance have been eroded by the tabloid style of what I would call celebrity journalism, in which anything goes so long as it might titillate viewers. If the sources of news are going to be paid by those who report the news, the sources will soon learn to say anything to make a more sensational story. TV networks in the past have paid for interviews with such prominent figures as Sirhan Sirhan, William Calley, G. Gordon Liddy and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In general, the networks are united in principle that paying for news stories is a dangerous practice and one that could lead to a competition based on how much a news organization could afford to pay for news. Nonetheless, most American journalists oppose paying sources for stories. In one poll only 17 percent of journalism students said they would ever consider paying for an interview. The general public likewise opposes the practice when they are aware of it, as less than a third considered it ethically acceptable. Many news organizations, such as the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times forbid the practice as part of their official code of ethics. Tom Bigler, vice president of WBRE-TV, offered his opinion: "I assure you, checkbook journalism is absolutely something we will never take part in. In fact, our station wouldn't give a nickel for a story. Checkbook journalism is fundamentally wrong. It’s simply not proper to ethical journalism. We would never, never, never stoop that low. I know of networks that have done it time to time and they always come to regret it." News directors of other Pennsylvania TV stations echoed the same sentiments. Acceptance of its use in Europe The practice of paying news sources has been ongoing in Europe and Britain since about the 1850s. According to journalist Neville Thurlbeck, the British press has been practicing chequebook