Eric D. Snider has been a film critic for nearly 10 years, but he had never attended a press junket until last month, when he went to Seattle to interview the stars of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Snider could have basked in the lavish treatment given to writers, but instead he felt embarrassed and guilty, so he decided to expose the entire decadent process -- and the resultant shoddy, fluffy journalism -- on his blog: "[Critics on the junket] are basically being bought by the studio: We'll show you a good time, and then you be our monkey-boys and write lots of nice stories about us!" wrote Snider, whose reviews appear in Salt Lake City Weekly and Willamette Week. The blog post quickly gained attention and was linked from major journalism sites, leading to a strong reaction from Paramount, the studio that hosted the shindig: "I expected not to be invited to any more junkets, which would be fine, because I didn't intend to go on any more. But they took it a step further and banned me from all their press screenings," Snider told Bob Garfield in the Aug. 18 On the Media broadcast.
