Tim Sprinkle

The News Merchant

Like it or not, this is the reality of TV news. From The Atlantic:

There is no single term that fully captures what Garrison does for a living, although it involves a lot of time spent cajoling people over the phone. He’s sometimes called a fixer, a story broker, or—his preference—an independent television producer and consultant, but all the titles mean the same thing: Garrison gets paid to bring tabloid stories to TV news programs. Missing toddlers, murdered coeds, septuplets, serial killers—an endless parade of freaks and victims is marched through the studio sets of Dateline NBC, 20/20, Good Morning America, Inside Edition, and countless other shows, all to satisfy viewers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for real-life tears and melodrama. Sometimes network bookers go out hunting for subjects themselves, armed with bouquets of flowers and boxes of tissues and the names of their star anchors (Diane Sawyer, Matt Lauer) as chits. In many cases, though, Garrison gets there first, locks up the rights to the person’s story, and becomes an unavoidable middleman in whatever transactions follow.

In addition to feeding what Garrison likes to call “Oh my God” stories to news networks, people like him serve another purpose: they make it easy for mainstream media outlets to pay for interviews while obscuring the fact that they do. The agent delivers the interview, and in return the network makes him a paid producer or consultant for that particular program; what he then does with the money—keep it or share it—is his own business. (For his part, Garrison tends to keep the whole fee, while sometimes promising to try to secure a book or movie deal for the grieving mother or accused murderer’s ex-girlfriend he is representing.) If the person has a diary or photo album to sell for on-air use, Garrison can help with that, too.