 Past examples include stories about Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, O. J. Simpson, Princess Diana, and Richard Nixon, where sources were sometimes paid millions of dollars for interviews.Defenders of the practice consider news information to be a commodity, which a source has a right to sell to a reporter for the highest price, in the same way the publication sells its news to the public.When payments to a source became disclosed to the public, however, it has even undermined court cases, as when witnesses admitted they had been paid for providing confidential information to the press about the case.