DID NBC News pay the family of former POW Shoshana Johnson $5,000 to use their house for interviews?

NBC execs vehemently deny it – a spokeswoman said all their interviews for any POW-related stories were conducted by Stone Phillips in a hotel room.

But the buzz of an alleged “agreement” with the family has been the talk of the media center in Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas all weekend.

Sources on the ground in Texas suggested yesterday that NBC may have backed off when word leaked.

The rumor underscores the heated competition to land the big interview subjects – and seems to indicate things are getting back to normal after the war.

“These are the kind of feature stories where we see this kind of thing,” says Syracuse University’s Dr. Robert Thompson.

“It’s a dog-eat-dog, competitive environment and when you start hearing things like this you’ve got to figure that we’re getting back to business as usual,” he said.

Johnson was among the group of POW’s who were held in captivity by the Iraqis for more than three weeks after their convoy made a wrong turn and was ambushed by troops near Nasiriyah on March 23.

The group of seven POWs also included two Apache helicopter pilots whose aircraft was shot down on March 24.