American Express Secretly Funded Newsletter: American Express Secretly Funded Newsletter
American Express Co. has for more than a year been secretly financing a newsletter that criticizes the interest rates charged by competing bank credit cards.</br></br>Bank Credit Card Observer, a frequently quoted publication produced in Kendall Park, N.J., has receivedÛÓand will continue to receive until yearendÛÓa subsidy "likely to approach $500,000,Û according to the American Banker, a trade publication that broke the story yesterday.</br></br>American Express began financing the newsletter a few months before it launched its own lower-interest Optima credit card to compete with MasterCard and Visa. The newsletterÛÓ like several similar publicationsÛÓhas given editorial credit to Optima for helping to drive down credit card interest rates.</br></br>American Express and John C. Pollock, the newsletter's publisher, yesterday confirmed the arrangement but declined to discuss the exact amount involved. Pollock acknowledged that he is getting a monthly grant of $20,000 from American Express.</br></br>Colleagues in the consumer credit and journalism fields expressed shock and dismay at the American Express link to Bank Credit Card Observer, although many defended the newsletterÛªs contents.