You didn't hear this in the 1980s. It was a time of innocence. When national newspaper reporters still pedaled their bicycles to official meetings at the Ministry of Public Security, and took a three-day train ride for an assignment to Xinjiang, they didn't get paid by interviewees.

In contrast, last week, a financial news reporter and a former colleague (now apparently a full-time day trader of stocks), who worked for a prestigious business newspaper, pleaded guilty in a Beijing court for taking bribes from a Chinese company newly-listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The reporter had picked out some flaws in the company's advertising campaigns. That was apparently out of an innocent intention, for the court could not find that his purpose was to force the company to pay him hush money.

However, his former colleague claimed he received a telephone call from the company hoping that he could stop the reporter from running more "negative" stories disruptive to the company's overseas fund-raising plan.

But, one of the company's top executives claimed, it was the former colleague himself who offered to act as a middleman, in return for money. Anyway, that was how the first bribe was taken 150,000 yuan ($18,750), a young reporter's salary for two years.

The money was reported by the former colleague to have been entirely used to "stir-fry" stocks, with the Chinese stock market in an unprecedented bull run, and nothing went to the reporter.

But as the reporter picked up the so-called gift packet from the dinner table where his former colleague had taken him to meet the company executive, he was stopped by plain-clothes policemen. It was a parcel containing 250,000 yuan in cash, enough to buy a China-made Rowe.

The company had in fact already reported to the police that it was being forced to pay out bribes, as news reports about the trial revealed.

However, the reporter might have been set up by the company, or by the company in collaboration with his former colleague, but taking what he said was an "abnormally heavy" gift packet was clearly a mistake.

He could have guessed what it might be, could he not? It could not have been just a "little expression," and he should have known the packet was something that would put him at risk of bribery allegations.

This was a reporter who, according to some from the Chinese language press, had published more than just one celebrated investigative report. But how could a person so easily trade his or her flowering career in a respectable, at least supposedly respectable service, with just one gift packet?

This is a question that is never going to be raised in the court debate. In reality, since the 1990s, Chinese reporters have been picking up red packets or "taxi expenses" from various press occasions. The customs of the market economy, as modeled on the bad example in government-business relations, has made their careers vulnerable to exceptional gifts.

Even worse, some smaller media tend to mix the management of their content and business. A magazine affiliated with a quite well-known university, friends there told me, even keeps a quota for each of its editorial staff member to bring in new subscription money.

Despite the complexity in each individual case, this is ugly. And ultimately, it is corruption. This is not the way to run a healthy service.

All media will have to learn to keep good writers by paying them good money or they can fold up their business entirely. Journalists, if they plan to stay in a public service rather than becoming self-employed PR agents, will also have to learn some standards for themselves at least never to touch weird gift packets.

E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/14/2007 page4)