The quasi-official newspaper of the national capital’s elite dropped the quasi (and all pretense of ever speaking truth to power, as it were) with this bombshell (Politico):
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”
The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.
Among other things, this offer basically makes the Post dependent upon the Administration (and other politicians) for revenue. Keep that in mind any time you read the Post – especially if the paper and the politicians go through with this.
For a while, I actually thought the Post would be one of the few newspapers to survive, but this could easily kill it.
UPDATE: Apparently, the news department of the Post has put the kibosh on any reporters showing up for this little farce (Politics Daily), which is fine as far as it goes, but it still doesn’t absolve the paper from being dependent upon the people it is covering for revenue and profit. Thus, the ethical storm cloud does not go away.
FURTHER UPDATE: Never mind, the Post has wisely chosen to drop the whole thing , but that they were even willing to consider it is a terrible stain on the paper.
One of the curious things about this whole bit is the term the Post chose to describe their merchandising of the elite, salons. That obviously is intended to hearken back to the days of philosophes of the French Enlightenment.
While the French philosophes had many admirable virtues, they also had severe drawbacks. Many were elitist snobs and anti-Christian. These people were the first social engineers of the modern era, and their philosophies provided the basis for that disaster known as the Reign of Terror.
The philosophes helped to lead France down a dead end. They elevated reason over faith in God. Their so-called Goddess of Reason justified social engineering, that is, direct the lives of other people to provide “order.” Thus liberty did not arrive in France until its people absorbed the influence of the American and English Enlightenments.