Editor’s Note: Iowa State Daily arts & entertainment editor Conor Bezane accepted an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles in order to investigate the issue of press junkets.

All-expense-paid trips to Hawaii, New York and Los Angeles. First class airplane tickets complete with taxi vouchers for ground transportation. Complimentary meals and free beer. Exclusive interviews with movie stars.

How about a free trip to Maui for a screening of “The Beach” and an interview with Leonardo DiCaprio? Sound like a good deal? Well, if you’re a journalist, you may be selling yourself out.

Organized by media relations departments of major film studios and record companies, press junkets drum up publicity, and that’s why they’re hosted.

For Troy Melhus, movie critic for The Des Moines Register, going on junkets is completely out of the question for ethical reasons.

“What they do is kind of create some kind of artificial relationship,” Melhus said. “We don’t want to create some kind of obligation. We want to avoid any obligation or even any appearance of an obligation to cover it in a positive light or change objective reporting.”

Melhus was offered the trip to Maui to go interview Leonardo DiCaprio, and he turned it down.

“It’s the ethics of it,” Melhus explained. “It’s the idea of being impartial and being able to feel like you aren’t obligated to write only positive things about something. That’s a horrible position to be in, if you don’t want to write the truth or your true feelings because they sprung for a $100 hotel room or something.”

When “The Straight Story” came out, Melhus was invited on another junket to Los Angeles, but he did not accept it either, despite the fact that it was filmed in Iowa.

“Our policy is we can’t accept it unless we pay for it ourselves,” Melhus said. “We could’ve gone, but we would’ve had to pay for our own airfare, food and lodging.”

The phenomenon of press junkets is happening on a national level, and in California, it couldn’t be more prevalent.

Jessica Yadegaran, metro news assistant at the San Diego Union-Tribune, attended junkets while she was in college. Yadegaran worked as arts and entertainment editor of The Daily Aztec at San Diego State University and attended junkets for “Jungle 2 Jungle,” “Good Will Hunting,” “Scream 2” and “Wild Things.”

“[For ‘Jungle 2 Jungle’] my room had a stipend for room service and massages if I wanted them, but I didn’t take advantage of it,” Yadegaran said.

“A real film critic would never be so shallow as to be swayed by room service and talking to these movie stars,” she said.

Since she’s been at the Union-Tribune, the paper’s film critic has gone on one junket for “Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me” in order to interview Mike Myers, but he did not take advantage of the perks, she said. She recalled people from MTV being at the junkets but rarely any journalists from high profile newspapers.

“There are people that still accept them, but I don’t think there’s as big of a tendency for large metro dailies who have a reputation to uphold,” she said. “MTV is a whole different story though.”

Although Yadegaran is a veteran of press junkets, now that she’s in the professional journalism world, she won’t accept invitations to junkets.

“I want the respect of my colleagues here, and in order to do that, I couldn’t go,” she said.

The Los Angeles Times reported that in promoting Stanley Kubrick’s swansong “Eyes Wide Shut,” a publicity firm known as PMK distributed a waiver at the film’s press junket asking to see footage of interviews with Tom Cruise before they ran on television.

“In the world of entertainment journalism, there are those who attend press junkets and those who are real journalists,” Robert Hofler, a columnist for Hollywood trade publication Variety, said in an article last May. “Even among junketeers, there exists a hierarchy between the people who proudly call themselves POWs (Pay Own Way) and the junket whores.”

When college journalists were invited this spring to attend a junket sponsored by Dreamworks Pictures, the temptation was just too great.

Fifty college journalists accepted the opportunity earlier this month to fly to Los Angeles on a junket for the movie “Road Trip,” an upcoming film starring Seann William Scott (“American Pie”) and Tom Green about the adventures of a group of college kids on a road trip.

“I was interested in experiencing it not only for the free trip, but also to see what happens on a press junket,” said Monique Frigard, culture editor for the Golden Gater at San Francisco State University who attended the junket.

The Daily was offered to send a writer and accepted with the intention of investigating. What goes on at a press junket? What kind of tactics do the film companies use to influence or slant coverage?

Here’s a recap of my experiences at the “Road Trip” college press junket.

Students from as far as New York, Miami and Chicago flew into Los Angeles on the morning of Saturday, April 1, for a one-night stay. Dreamworks had all the bases covered. They gave us taxi vouchers so that when we got to the airport we wouldn’t have to pay a dime to get to the hotel.

After we checked into the Holiday Inn Brentwood-Bel Air, Dreamworks representatives distributed our press kits along with a gift bag including a couple free CDs from the Dreamworks catalogue. An evening cocktail party was the first scheduled event, and it was preceded by the showing of trailers for upcoming Dreamworks film releases.

“I felt flattered but in a cheap sort of way,” Frigard said. “I felt like they had gone out of their way to make [Dreamworks films] appealing, rather than letting us form our own opinions about the trailers.”

A bus took us all to a downtown L.A. movie theater, where we were given free popcorn and soda. After the movie ended, Dreamworks representatives took us to the Westwood Brewing Company, a bar near UCLA in a vibrant, trendy neighborhood. Several stars of the movie, including Seann William Scott, were on hand, hanging out at the bar shooting pool and chatting with the incoming journalists.

Unlimited free beer and mixed drinks were made available for the rest of the night, as we junketeers were given the opportunity to schmooze with the celebrities.

Roundtable interviews with the film’s stars, director and producer filled our time on Sunday morning, which began with a fancy breakfast complete with freshly squeezed orange juice.

The junket was capped off by a plane ride home in first class.

“To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t been on spring break; I was tired and needed a break,” Frigard said. “I enjoyed the facilities, especially the Jacuzzi, so my spirits were naturally lifted. But this does not fog my judgment on the quality of the film. And I think that Dreamworks wants any kind of publicity, good or bad, mentioned to the audience we serve.” Frigard said she would do it again in a second.

Will Kiser, variety editor for the University of Georgia Red and Black newspaper, had no doubts about accepting the junket. “Road Trip” was partly filmed on the school’s campus in Athens, Ga.

“I was nervous at first, ethically, but I haven’t been feeling as bad,” Kiser said. “If this were a trip to a press junket for a movie that had nothing to do with our town, I would feel bad. If we as a paper were to ignore it, we would be ignoring something that was important to a huge population in our city.”

The promotional perks don’t stop at free trips. T-shirts, CDs, drinks, toys, alarm clocks and other things are frequently sent to promote films.

“It used to be you’d take what you can get, but most of us don’t do that anymore,” said Dennis Ryerson, editor in chief of The Des Moines Register.

Melhus wants to maintain credibility, and that’s why he is careful.

“I used to cover the nightlife beat, and I would turn down free drinks just because I didn’t ever want to feel that obligation,” Melhus said. “If I did have something negative to say about a nightclub or something, I didn’t want to feel obligated.”

Though the temptation may be high to accept these publicity stunts, most newspapers have codes of ethics that bar them from doing so. It’s not worth it if you ask The Des Moines Register.

“In my experience, basically all we’ve got is our credibility,” said Melhus. “It’s all that’s there for us.” “I think most journalists at this level recognize that, and you don’t want to jeopardize that for something foolish like that.”