Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Context Phase
Mr. Harry Browne:
That is right. It is done specifically for that purpose. The great international example of a kind of scandal around this area was when The Los Angeles Timesin 1999 did a supplement with a big convention centre in Los Angeles, the Staples Center. It was a very large magazine of 168 pages. It was ad bait. It was designed to attract lots of advertisers to that supplement. That would have been fairly commonplace, but then it emerged that the profits from the sale of advertising for that supplement were actually being shared between the newspaper and the Staples Center itself. That was seen as somehow crossing an ethical line that the supplement itself did not.