Travel writing and guidebooks are riddled with the kind of corruption that journalists salivate about exposing in other domains, says this item about the controversy sparked by a tell-all book by former Lonely Planet writer Thomas Kohnstamm, titled Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism. Travel writers routinely take freebies, don't do their homework (or even in some cases visit the places they write about) and ignore the short-comings of their destinations, the piece says, noting how fewer and fewer newspaper travel departments are requiring that their contributors meet minimum standards on conflict-of-interest. The chief reason for all this, retorts John Masters, president of the Travel Media Association of Canada, in this letter to the editor: journalists aren't paid enough. I guess that makes it okay.
TAGS: corruption, the biz
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