The French Gravy Train   

Some freelance writers are lucky: They have spouses. Others depend on the kindness of strangers. And for those who don't mind dining on someone else's tab, Paris can be a gravy train of free drinks, free food and even free trips.

It's a French tradition, says Mark Hunter, who teaches journalism at the American University in Paris and has explored the problem of corruption in the French press. And the syndrome extends far beyond an occasional junket to the south of France. A well-known local TV anchor, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, was recently charged with accepting nearly $190,000 worth of travel expenses, meals and hotel rooms between 1987 and 1990 from a businessman who also has been charged with corrupting the mayor of Lyon.

More mundane forms of corruption take the form of countless freebies, which many French reporters consider their due. American freelancer Alix Christie was startled to note two sets of press kits at a press conference held by Elf Aquitaine, France's largest industrial corporation: The ones for Anglo-Americans consisted of a press release; those for the French included..a free watch.

The ones without were assembled by Thomas Saunders, an Elf press attaché who works with the foreign media and refuses to make gift-giving a part of his job. Ethics aside, Saunders says, "I don't think giving gifts does anything. Journalists still write ratty stories."

Even in the U.S. freelancers toe a fuzzy line. It's not unusual for writers to accept free review copies of books or tickets to opening night at the theater. And newspaper travel sections are notoriously lax about determining the precise financing of their wandering freelancers' travels. One thing's certain: The papers themselves aren't paying. "Expenses! You're kidding!" says one well-traveled writer who expects to receive $600 from the New York Times for a story that involved hundreds of miles on the road.

Six hundred dollars wouldn't pay the rent for a hovel in Paris, which is one reason freelancers are sorely tempted to accept gifts when offered. Another is the pressure to be "polite" in a society that reveres style and gracious thanks. "It's a struggle," says Walter Wells, news editor of the International Herald Tribune, whose writers' guidelines state that the paper "cannot publish a story by anyone who has accepted a free trip, hotel accommodations, meals in the case of a restaurant review, or anything else from a company or organization."

Wells, whose wife Patricia is the paper's influential restaurant critic, adds, "I've been in restaurants where we've sat for an hour demanding l'addition." When you insist on paying, he explains, you're rejecting the restaurant's hospitality in suggesting you think they think you can be bought.

Where do freelancers draw the line? Christie says that beyond an occasional lunch, "I wouldn't accept anything from a company I write about a lot." She says her French colleagues, meanwhile, think nothing of asking their corporate sources for discounts on major items like computers or cars.

"I don't think you can be incredibly ideological, because if you say no to everything you won't, as a freelancer, be able to participate in most things," she says, adding that it's a slippery slope – "and the longer I'm here the slipperier the slope becomes."

U.S. publications generally abide by the it's-o.k.-if-you-can-consume-it-in-one-sitting rule. "We can take anything up to $50," says Newsweek Bureau Chief Theodore Stanger, who believes freelancers should live by the same rules.

That's easier said than done if you're eking out an existence in one of the most expensive countries in the world. "Papers that rely on freelancers can give them all the rules they want," says Washington Post correspondent Sharon Waxman. "..The problem is freelancers are underpaid. You can't live on $200."

She mentions a celebrated case in which one Paris-based stringer not only accepted but allegedly solicited free travel and accommodations from organizations he intended to cover. "It was a big scandal," Waxman says, and to some it presented a worst-case scenario of what can happen when an occasional free lunch turns into a freebie mill.

Of course, there may be another side to the story. Maybe too many nights in a lonely garret drove the writer over the edge. In Waxman's words, "Maybe he did this to make a living." l

– D.B.