"The Way….Stories Are Done These Days."

On Sunday, "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley interviewed Michael Jordan. It was a wide-ranging, in-depth interview, and you would have been hard pressed to have come away from it without insights into the man Jordan has become. There was something else viewers likely took away from the interview, however: The fact that Jordan's new book, Driven From Within, was hitting bookshelves the day after the broadcast.

The book was featured first in the introduction to the piece. Here's Bradley's intro:

Michael Jordan is one of the most recognized names in the world, and among the most dominant and gifted athletes ever to play professional sports. But how does a man who has been called the most competitive person alive still compete when there are no more games to play, no more championships to win? It's a question Jordan tries to answer in his new book, Driven from Within.

According to "60 Minutes" Executive Producer Jeff Fager, publishers increasingly look to broadcasts like "60 Minutes" as platforms to sell books. Often, subjects will refuse to be interviewed unless they can time the interview to coincide with their book's release. "A publisher can go to a news outlet and say, 'you can have that story, but you have to mention the book,'" says Fager. "It's the way a number of stories are done these days."

I asked Bradley if he thought Jordan would have done the interview if he didn't have a book to sell. He responded via email: "NO." He wrote that he'd been trying to land an interview with Jordan for years, "and when he decided to do a magazine broadcast they came to see us and all of the other news magazines." Was there an agreement in place that they would mention the book? "No agreement that I'm aware of," wrote Bradley. "I know what the publisher wanted but we didn't agree to anything."

Fager says such formal agreements are unnecessary, because it's "implied that we are going to show the book. We always show the book." He adds that "we do it in a subtle way, try to do it as little as possible, but it is a part of what happens here."

The promotional nature of many television appearances, of course, has long been apparent on the morning shows and late night talk shows. But for the people at "60 Minutes," who pride themselves on storytelling and quality journalism, plugging books doesn't always come easy. "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley, who recently interviewed former football player Bill Romanowski – and mentioned his book – says "the most important thing is we never have preconceived notions or agreements about what the interview will cover." He says "we turn down a lot of [books]. We read them and decide if there's anything newsworthy."

Often, such an arrangement is inevitable. Ex-FBI chief Louis Freeh, for example, is the kind of subject that "60 Minutes" would love to feature, but he only agreed to make the rounds on television when his book came out. Sometimes the situation is reversed, but the influence of the publishing industry is still apparent, as was the case with Charles Robert Jenkins. An army deserter who was imprisoned in North Korea for nearly 40 years, Jenkins agreed to be featured on "60 Minutes" because he thought it would help him get a book deal in the United States.

All this is not to say that the storytelling has to suffer just because a segment includes a plug for a book. Certainly, the viewers don't seem to mind: The Jordan interview helped "60 Minutes" score ratings 42 percent above the show's average. But the promotional subtext in some "60 Minutes" segments has Fager concerned about the proverbial slippery slope. "You want to make sure if you're going to do something where a book is mentioned, it's going to be important," he says.