NEW YORK — NBC News' broadcast of a stripped-down Golden Globe Awards on Sunday raises questions about the heavy influence of the entertainment division on its sister news organization, industry veterans said.
Media experts said that putting what was originally an entertainment show under the auspices of NBC News, whose producers would pen the script for the program, undermines the credibility of the news division.
"It's pretty clear there isn't much of a firewall between news and sales anymore, but my goodness, you don't want to bulldoze it," said Deborah Potter, a former CBS and CNN correspondent who runs NewsLab, a nonprofit journalism training center in Washington.
NBC tapped its news division Monday to anchor an exclusive news conference announcing the Golden Globe winners after threats of a picket by the striking Writers Guild of America forced the cancellation of the ceremony.
Potter questioned why the Globes merited an hour of live news coverage in prime time, while Tuesday's New Hampshire presidential primaries garnered only brief news updates.
"The obvious reason is that it's about money, not news," she said. "To essentially sell out your coverage so the owner of your news division can retain some money is obviously problematic. It raises a lot of questions about what else might be for sale."
NBC News spokeswoman Allison Gollust said the division was covering the Globes because of their news value.
"Given all the attention that has been focused on this event and related industry issues, it is clearly worthy of our coverage," she said.
Other network executives declined to comment.
By turning the awards announcement into a news event, NBC was able to skirt the $6-million license fee that would normally have been paid to the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., which hands out the awards. And by holding the event under the umbrella of the news division -- whose employees do not work under the Writers Guild contract that is currently under dispute -- the network hopes to avoid a picket line that could keep stars from attending. (Guild officials said they still might picket the news conference.)
In the last few years, the star-studded Globes ceremony has generated between $10 million and $15 million in profit for NBC.
Network executives criticized the guild's vow to picket. "It feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom, but NBC wants to try and keep that prom alive," NBC entertainment chief Ben Silverman told radio host Ryan Seacrest on Monday.
