One Last Thing: The Washington Post is Dead. Long Live the DC Prostitute
Which is the whore and which is Washington Post publisher Katherine Weymouth?
or
The difference between Karen Weymouth and a whore is that the whore has some measure of dignity and self-respect, and costs less.
Charles Kaiser has the obituary:
The Washington Post died today. It was five months short of its 132nd birthday.
News of the demise of the once-great news gathering organization came in a story by Mike Allen at Politico.com, which reported that Post publisher Katharine Weymouth has decided to solicit payoffs of between $25,000 and $250,000 from Washington lobbyists, in return for one or more private dinners in her home, where lucky lobbyists will receive a chance for “your organization’s CEO” to interact with “Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post” and “key Obama administration and congressional leaders …”
The decision by the Post’s publisher to sell access to government officials was the latest–and by far, the most horrific–in a series of disastrous decisions in the last two weeks which, taken together, have destroyed what was once one of the proudest finest brands in American journalism.
And that’s the NICE stuff.
In a chat today on washingtonpost.com, Post Congressional reporter Paul Kane cited Brauchli’s memo as proof that the newsroom would not participate in these confabs–even though the statement of the company’s corporate spokeswoman directly contradicted that. And even if newsroom staffers are excluded from these dinners, the idea that the paper’s publisher would be selling this kind of access remains far, far, far beyond the pale.
Early indications of the collapse of judgement at the Washington news organizations included the decision to allow Glenn Beck to host a chat at washingtpost.com-–a scant two weeks before Beck hosted certifiably-maniacal Michael Scheuer on his own program, so that Scheuer could strongly advocate a massive new terrorist attack on the United States by Osama Bin Laden.
Next came the firing of Dan Froomkin, the best and most original reporter on the Post’s website–presumably because Froomkin wrote so many accurate stories pointing up the inadequacies of the national staff of the Post.
But both of those events paled next to this morning’s news, which was leaked to Politico by a healthcare lobbyist. In a piece of remarkable understatement, Mike Allen wrote, “it’s a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.”
Go read the rest, it’s brutal.
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
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July 2nd, 2009 at 4:52 pm
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July 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
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