The word payola traces back to rock and roll’s early days, back when the only large-scale way new acts could get their name and music out was on the radio. Deejays in the 1960s controlled their own playlists much more than today, so a band could drive into town, play a few concerts, and pay off a few deejays to get their songs into the rotation. When they rolled out toward the next stop, they left behind the impression that they were the next big thing.

It’s not illegal for a deejay, radio station, or anyone at all to accept money in exchange for playing someone’s music, but US law does make pay for play illegal if the sponsorship isn’t openly divulged, if the song isn’t treated, in other words, as a commercial.

Today’s media world provides almost infinite ways for musicians, video commentators, moviemakers, and iPhone app developers to get word out about what they’re doing. Anyone can post a video on YouTube or give away software on a web page. Payola is still out there, though. Wired magazine ran a story about it in the world of iPhone apps.

It works like this. You invent an iPhone app but can’t get anyone to notice. What do you do? One possibility is offer money to one of the well-known iPhone app review sites in exchange for a review of your creation. That gets the word out pretty well, so developers are starting to pay up. This modern payola scheme is enraging the iPhone community, however. Jason Snell, who works for Apple’s own app-review website complains, “Readers need to know that true editorial reviews are fair, and aren’t the product of any quid pro quo involving money or any other favors.”Brian X. Chen, “Fallout from Wired.com’s iPhone App Payola Story,” Wired, Gadget Lab, March 24, 2010, accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/app-review-payola-reaction.

Michael Vallez, owner of the app-review site Crazy Mike’s Apps, disagrees. He charges for reviews without disclosing that to his readers, but he doesn’t guarantee a positive report. If he thinks the app isn’t worth buying, he sends the money back and cancels the review.

The Wired article concludes with an opinion from Kenneth Pybus, a professor of journalism and mass communication: “Undisclosed paid reviews are indisputably unethical because they manipulate the public. That’s an easy call to say it’s ethically wrong because that is a disservice to readers. It ought to be information that applies to readers and not information that advances yourself financially.”

On a message board, Ms. G. C. from Miami writes,

Here’s the problem: an interior decorator’s bid is broken down into two parts-(A) the decorator’s services and (B) the cost of labor and supplies. Most customers think (B) is a fixed cost-they forget it’s not the decorator’s fault if cabinetmakers charge an arm and a leg. So, where do customers look the closest when they’re comparing costs? That’s right, (A)-the decorator’s fee.

Well, decorators are creative people and for years they’ve been doing some very creative bidding. They’ve been lowballing (A) and padding (B), expecting the laborers to kick back a percentage of their inflated fees to the decorator. Surprised? Everyone’s doing it. Everyone, that is, except me. It’s deceptive. And as a Christian, I think it’s just plain wrong.

The customer’s final cost is about the same either way you cut it, so most decorators don’t feel they’re doing anything wrong. Are they right?

Needless to say, “blowing the whistle” on such a widespread and accepted practice would only damage my professional reputation.Ms. G. C. from Miami, “The Case of the Casual Kickback,” Urbana.org.

Like all recent NBA All-Star players, Kevin Johnson made a lot of money during his pro basketball career. It drained out fairly quickly too. A few hundred-thousand went to the family of a sixteen-year-old high-school girl in Phoenix after a he-said, she-said sex accusation. A decade later, a similar story emerged, but at a different place: this time it was three girls in Sacramento, California, who attended St. Hope Academy. They took their stories—each told of a similar incident involving Johnson—to the recruitment advisor, Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez. Soon after, Ms. Wong-Hernandez was gone. Her resignation was a protest over the way the complaints were handled internally at the school, which was by dismissing them. Not only did St. Hope Academy take no action, the local police also decided not to press any charges in a case that essentially came down to one person’s word against another’s.

St. Hope Academy, as it happens, wasn’t a public school but a private business, and Kevin Johnson was the founder and CEO. A lot of the money flowing into the young institution came from the federal government as grants from the AmeriCorps program. After accusations surfaced that the grant money wasn’t spent appropriately, the school agreed to pay back $423,836.50 to the government (about half of what the school had received). The first payment, about $73,000, was made by Kevin Johnson himself.

So things probably would have ended, except for an AmeriCorps inspector general named Gerald Walpin. He believed Johnson had gotten way too good a deal: the school should have been forced to pay back much more of the grant money it had received. On May 5, 2009, he took the accusation to a California congressman who in turn brought public attention to the issue. On June 10, Mr. Walpin was fired. In an editorial statement, the Washington Times complained, “Mr. Walpin was fired with no explanation and no warning to Congress, even though the act governing inspectors general says IGs can be removed only after the president gives Congress 30 days’ notice and a reason for the firing. Rather than investigate the IG’s serious complaints, Mr. Obama fired him. In short, he snuffed out the whistleblower rather than heed the whistle.”“Editorial: Stonewalling on Walpin-gate,” The Washington Times, July 10, 2009, accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/10/stonewalling-on-walpin-gate.

A local Sacramento TV station doing some follow-up uncovered a report detailing hush money payments at St. Hope and noted that the former NBA All-Star “often described himself as a personal friend” of another avid basketball player, President Obama.“Report: Johnson Offered to Pay Accuser,” KCRA.com, November 20, 2009, accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.kcra.com/news/21679385/detail.html.

When police officer April Leatherwood went undercover in Memphis, she changed her name to Summer Smith. She didn’t change her socks for a year—no showers or brushing her teeth either.

Her daily routine was to hang out on the street smoking and trying to befriend drug addicts. They’d take her to their dealers, where she’d make a buy and then try to find out who was the next person up the ladder. Her work resulted in about three hundred arrests, everyone from two-bit drug sellers to major movers who organized the street-level crime from luxury apartments.

Why’d she do it? According to the newspaper article relating her story, she loved the camaraderie of the department and its protect-and-serve mission.

When she emerged from the undercover program, she was promoted to detective. Unfortunately, her three-year romantic partner had moved on, and it was difficult to get the bad memories out of her mind. Still, when the reporter asked whether she’d do it again, she said, “Yeah.”Kristina Goetz, “A Year of Living Dangerously Takes a Toll on Undercover Memphis Officer,” Commercial Appeal, August 30, 2009, accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/aug/30/year-of-living-dangerously-takes-its-toll.

All kinds of things happen in advertising agencies. Part of the reason is the diversity: a typical medium-to-large agency requires many different kinds of work, and that brings together a rainbow of people. There are suited, business types in the client services section. They work with budgets and bulleted lists and connect the agency with the corporate client. Down the hall the planners dress more casually and study demographics and culture. They invent market segments with names like soccer moms and then devise strategies for appealing to soccer moms’ distinct interests and tastes. Further down the hall, there are the agency’s actual commercial makers. They call themselves creative talent and are free to appear for work in jeans and ratty t-shirts. For their paycheck, they plan the short films the rest of us call TV commercials. The typical large agency also needs some HR people, accountants, computer techs, and lawyers.

Most advertising agencies have a pretty good mix of men and women, and in general, there are a lot of young people in the field because the long hours and short deadlines tend to lead workers to seek employment elsewhere eventually.

Most agencies are good places for romance. The chemicals are right: young workers, long hours, the excitement of million-dollar accounts, and lots of different types of people for different tastes. Those are also, as it happens, good ingredients for sex, as people at BBDO (an Omnicom agency) in New York City discovered when a grainy cell phone movie went viral. Shot by a guy in the creative department, he stuck his camera over the top of a cubicle and caught a nude couple wedged into the back corner.

As far as the scandal went, it didn’t take long for industry insiders to figure out who’d been caught, and from there, the information spread that they were both married to other people. The website Gawker.com followed the action closely, posting the original film and then running follow-ups. In a nutshell, this is what happened. The romantic couple continued at their jobs. No word about how their marriages are doing. The filmer got fired. He downloaded the footage onto his computer and then sent it around to a few friends. He had nothing to do—he says—with the fact that a few weeks later it was all over the web. In his words,

It ended up on Gawker and Mediabistro and then the word got back to me that all the creatives were sending it around. I freaked. I thought it was amazing how something could go viral and end up online so quickly when I had nothing to do with it really.Hamilton Nolan, “The Cameraman Speaks: He’s Fired but the Sex Tape Couple Keep Their Jobs,” Gawker, November 26, 2008, accessed May 19, 2011, http://gawker.com/5099143/the-cameraman-speaks-hes-fired-but-the-sex-tape-couple-keep-their-jobs.

Well, he was the one who filmed and originally distributed it.

The discussion posted on the Gawker web page is probably hotter than the sex that got everything going. Many issues come up, including: Why did the filmer get fired while the adulterers got to keep their jobs? One answer someone wrote in is that filming and distributing a sex tape is unethical (and possibly illegal if minors end up seeing it). A poster who calls himself BritSwedeGuy responds:

How could you be sacked for filming something you could see at work?

Would he have been sacked if he’d taken the video to HR?

Probably not.

So is he being sacked for withholding evidence then?

That only makes sense if the evidence was of a sackable offence.

Has he been sacked for passing the video on? Surely he’s a whistle-blower in that case and ought to be protected.

This is his argument. First, it doesn’t make sense to fire the filmer for recording the sex, since the act took place in public, and anyone (tall) could’ve seen it. The perpetrators couldn’t reasonably object to being filmed if they were exhibiting themselves so openly. Second, if the filmer had taken the film to HR to report the fact that sex was going on, he probably wouldn’t have been fired, and the entire episode would’ve been managed internally (and quietly) inside the agency. That means the only justifiable reason for firing the guy was that he digitalized the video and, in essence, made it possible for others to beam it across the Internet. If that’s what he did, though, then he’s a whistle-blower and should be protected.