When Newspapers Peddle Influence

Some time last week the Washington Post issued a flier advertising a "salon" on the health-care issue. Over dinner at the home of the paper's publisher, Katharine Weymouth, participants were promised "a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds."

The paper's executive editor and its "health-care reporters" would be there too, but not in a "confrontational" capacity, you could rest assured. Everything would be safely "off-the-record." And you could "bring your organization's CEO or executive director literally to the table" for a mere $25,000.

Even in Washington, it's unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to "alter the debate," as the Post's flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city's scourge of public corruption -- the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others -- seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.

It was a moment of rare, piquant hypocrisy. Let us take it slow and savor every drop.

To begin with, just think of the functions of righteousness that the Post effectively put up on the block. Here was journalism's zealous guardian of professional rectitude with its hand apparently out for a little bit of baksheesh. Here was the definer of the capital's consensus, the policer of its ideological boundaries, seemingly offering to adjust its vast reserves of Washington wisdom for you if the price was right.

In such a ham-handed manner, too. When the leading newspaper of the capital city of the world's most powerful country decides to turn influence-peddler, is this the best it can do? An advertisement that reads as though it were promoting expensive scotch? ("Bringing together those powerful few.") Not even favorite Post targets like Jack Abramoff stooped to that.

Even worse were the lame excuses offered by the paper's brass, who blamed one another after the embarrassing story broke and immediately canceled the get-together. The flier hadn't been properly "vetted," they said. Ms. Weymouth had been out of town. Plus assorted other feeble explanations.

If this was a slip it was a Freudian one, the kind that tells us something true and revealing about what is going on inside.

We are living, after all, in a sort of conflict-of-interest golden age. Professionalism is for sale almost wherever you choose to look. Among the forces that most conspicuously drove the late real-estate bubble, for example, were appraisers and bond rating agencies that apparently decided to put themselves on the market.

The city of Washington is an extreme case of this marketized world. The capital swarms with hired guns, payola pundits, and think tanks on a mission. Every bad idea that has ever appealed to the funding class is well-represented here. And with the coming of the health-care debate, as the Post itself has noted, the entire apparatus has swung into well-compensated action.

Then there is the city's cult of power, in which the Post sometimes serves as high priest. Despite its many famous takedowns of the corrupt, the newspaper often seems fascinated with the lives of the rich and the well-connected: their struggles for access, the clever things they say, the trappings of their wealth, the techniques by which they have monetized their power.

In April, for example, one Post columnist described a dinner salon series run by the Atlantic magazine whose guests "are as A-list as they come." Superstar names were dropped. The benefits to journalism were vigorously asserted. Rahm Emanuel himself was quoted hailing the suspension of "the adversarial."

The Post's own confused relationship with power is also often summarized by reference to dinner parties, in this case the ones given by Ms. Weymouth's grandmother, Katharine Graham. "The great men of Washington, up until the Nixon administration, came regularly to Mrs. Graham's dinner parties, the best ticket in town, and as they socialized over good food and wine, the adversarial role diminished," wrote David Halberstam in his 1979 book, The Powers That Be. "They were close, they were friends, these were not just men of power, they were men of good will, events were seen as they wanted them seen."

All that was missing, apparently, was a price tag.

Today, of course, the newspaper industry is in crisis. And public service, along with all such intangible ideals, is quickly disappearing into the cash nexus. The only possible reason to revive Ms. Graham's legendary dinners today is as a revenue stream.

Instead, of course, what the Post's proprietors did was hasten the day of reckoning. If I had $25,000 to spare, I'd advise them to forget about befriending the A-list. Stick to the public -- what you might call the Z-list.

Also in the Opinion Journal:
McNamara and the Liberals' War

A New York Solution for Bailing Out California

Comments

[ufopp]

As long as "reporting" and "journalism" is dependent on the rules of the economic system (financial growth, quarterly profits, etc.), I'm afraid we will never reach the 4th estate's goal of independence. How much longer can journalists claim that the newsroom has not been compromised and their companies continue as usual? WaPo's salon is but one example that's getting all the attention. But there are many more subtle and insidious ways that this has been happening. Loss of advertising revenue and consequent financial trouble for media companies is not entirely due to new media but the gutting of core values in journalism and reporting. This is happening not just at the national level (MSM's coverage of WMDs for example), but also at the local level where it's down to sports scores and crime scenes.

[lbrty 2112]

The real problem is that 'reporters' often think of themselves as bigger than the 'story'

Here's a summary of some good old fashioned influence peddling

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/1/14/71554.shtml

[RobinSeattle]

Again, I have long said that reporters are often compromised by their social relationships with the folks they cover.

If some columnist wants to be particularly ballsy, he/she should do a piece on who they believe are the most compromised political reporters in the media. Because when reporters are neutered by their personal relationships with pols, the information the public receives is whitewashed.

[tompoe]

Of course, PBS Newshour jumped all over this event, broadening the discussion quickly to media in general. Their ignoble ranting about the need for media to be able to engage similar strategies, but with "dignity and integrity", sickens anyone who understands the role of media, today. Whatever reputation newspapers or PBS had, is wiped out, now. Their credibility is beyond repair.