Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [16]
Conversely, when Team Rodent wants publicity, it’s easy to get. Every major Disney enterprise becomes news, and the company’s spokespeople are adept at wooing journalists without insulting their integrity. The town of Celebration had home buyers waiting in line because the development got coast-to-coast press attention, most of it favorable. The same is true for Disney’s new cruise line, its wild-animal theme park, and even the porn-purging Times Square incursion. Journalists aren’t as resistant to smooth corporate charm as they’d like you to believe; free food and an open bar always help.
Better than any other company, Disney understands the true face of the American media: hollow-cheeked, restless, and disenchanted. Most news operations in this country are small, parochial, and tightfisted. The people employed there are woefully underpaid, overworked, and often bored out of their skulls—ripe candidates for a junket to beautiful sun-drenched Florida, especially in the wintertime.
Many major-market papers and broadcast stations forbid their reporters from taking freebies, and in a perfect world that would be the rule for all journalists. The reason is obvious. We’re the first ones to crucify a politician for accepting undisclosed favors from cronies or special interests. For us to do the same would be hypocritical. The public could, and should, assume that a free vacation might influence a reporter’s objectivity, just as it might influence a congressman’s vote. It’s damn hard to stay neutral about somebody when you’re sipping their merlot and sucking down their jumbo shrimp. Incorruptible or not, reporters shouldn’t put themselves in a situation that raises the question.
That’s the theory, anyway. The reality is something else, as Team Rodent well knows. Deep down, the average journalist isn’t so different from the average autoworker or the average postal carrier or the average Super Bowl MVP. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance for a trip to Disney World?
The company is gung-ho on anniversaries, these being splendid occasions for inviting battalions of reporters to Orlando for weekends of high-end gluttony and mooching. Depending upon how cheap your newspaper or broadcast station happens to be, Disney is prepared to pay for just about everything, from air travel to lodging to entertainment. Company publicists say they’re not trying to buy us off with free food and fun; rather, they’re merely broadening Disney’s exposure by reaching out to interested media outlets—a coy hedge, but still closer to an honest defense than you’ll get from some reporters.
Those who take the free trips say they’re too ethical to be compromised by a plane ticket or a steak dinner or a toy dalmatian for the kids. These indignant assertions, made with a straight face, are hard to believe when you see the stampede of foam-flecked Fourth Estate freeloaders at a Disney dinner buffet.
I witnessed it myself in October 1986, which I believe was the last time I set foot in the Magic Kingdom. The dual occasion was the fifteenth anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World and the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Neither qualified as much of a news event, but that scarcely mattered; the ploy of marrying a blatantly commercial promotion to a patriotic anniversary is vintage Disney. Former chief justice Warren Burger was flown in to legitimize the celebration—the fact it was almost a year shy of the actual bicentennial (the Constitution wasn’t drafted until May 1787) went largely unnoticed by the fifty-two hundred alleged journalists who got chummed in.
My assignment