The Press Junket Economy

I have been in this trade long enough to know what a free trip is for. It is not for me. It never was.

Run your eye back over the week this magazine just covered. Lexus stood up a series of off-road videos for its GX and LX Overtrail trucks: selectable lockers front and rear, a Torsen limited-slip differential, an electronically managed suspension, all of it shot in Palo Duro Canyon, lit the way Lexus wanted, and published in the take where the truck never gets stuck. Jaguar ran an electric prototype of its Type 01 around the streets of Monaco, because if you are going to show a car nobody can buy yet, you may as well show it somewhere nobody you know can afford to live. Toyota started hybrid RAV4 production in Kentucky and broke ground on a paint shop, and brought the numbers a ribbon-cutting always brings, the targets for a building that is not yet built. Three companies, three events, one shared assumption underneath all of them: that we will print what we were shown and call it what we saw.

This is the press junket economy, and it is the water the entire automotive press swims in. A car company has a product and a story it would like told about that product. It cannot tell the story itself, because a company telling its own story is an advertisement, and the reader has learned to skip those. So it tells the story through us. It books the resort. It picks the road. It pours the wine. And then it waits, with the patience of a man who has done this a thousand times, for the flattery to come back wearing a byline.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying, because this is the part every young writer gets wrong in both directions. I am not saying the trips are bribes. They are not. A company that flew you to Portugal does not own your verdict, and any writer who thinks one good dinner bought his opinion has a cheaper opinion than I would print. And I am not saying take none of it, sit home, review the brochure from a parking lot. You cannot drive a new car you were never given. The access is the job. The trip is the only way to do the work.

What I am saying is harder than either of those, which is why nobody says it. The danger of the junket was never the steak. It is the frame.

Understand the trick, because it is a good one. The company does not lie to you. It does not need to. It simply decides, in advance, every fact you will be standing next to when you form your impression. It picks the canyon. It picks the corner. It picks the weather, the route, the order in which you drive the cars, the car you drive last and remember best. It hands you a day built like a sentence with the verdict already at the end, and then it lets you believe you reached the end yourself. Lexus did not tell anyone the trucks are capable. Lexus filmed the trucks being capable, on Lexus's road, and let the footage do the telling. That is more honest than a lie and more effective, and it is exactly the thing a magazine exists to interrupt.

Because here is what does not arrive first class. The price arrives by mail, if it arrives at all, weeks after the bamboo garden. The reliability arrives three years later in somebody's repair bill. The thing the company would rather you not stand next to is never on the itinerary, and the writer who only ever stands where he was placed is not a journalist. He is set dressing with a notebook.

The discipline, the whole discipline, the thing this magazine is for, is telling news from flattery when they are served on the same plate. News is the fact the company did not choose. Flattery is the fact the company chose for you. They look identical in the moment. They taste identical with the wine. You can only tell them apart by asking one ugly question at the table, every time, before the dessert: what am I not being shown, and who decided that.

I am aware this sounds like a man biting the hand. It is not. I am grateful for the hand. I am grateful for every loan, every flight, every dinner this trade has been handed, because without them there is no review and without the review there is no reader, and the reader is the only person in this transaction I actually work for. The deal is fine. The deal has always been fine. The deal becomes a disgrace the instant a writer forgets it was a deal, and starts mistaking a host's hospitality for a host's case proven.

So we will keep taking the trips, and we will keep saying so, plainly, at the foot of the page, in the small print where a decent magazine admits exactly what it was given and refuses to let it matter. We will drive the cars on the roads we are handed, and then we will write the sentence the company did not hand us. We will note, every time, that the canyon was chosen and the price was not printed and the building is not yet built. We will treat the brochure as evidence and never as a verdict, because the verdict is the one thing on the trip that does not belong to the company. It belongs to the reader. It is the only thing we brought home that we paid for ourselves.

Flattery arrives first class. News arrives by freight, late, in a plain box, with the postage due. A magazine is the building where somebody is still willing to sign for it.

Drive that.