Somewhere, I suspect, there’s a summer intern who can kiss off ever getting a job with the Washington Post. Mike Allen writes,
Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth said today she was cancelling plans for an exclusive “salon” at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few”: Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”
Weymouth is saying the fliers weren’t vetted before being released and that they misrepresented what she had intended. Everyone is appalled that WaPo tried to sell “access.” Chris Good at The Atlantic explains how it’s normally done:
The business of media-organized conferences, roundtables, seminars, and presentations works, in most cases, similarly to the everyday sale of newspapers and magazines. The editorial staff has something to offer in the way of content–information, expertise, relationships with prominent sources who will talk about health care in front of an audience (booking power), good questions for the experts and an ability to moderate the discussion–and the business side sells that content to advertisers or attendees.
Still too cozy if you ask me.
It sounds to me like the difference between a person setting two people up for a date, and a pimp.
Heard this morn – lobbyists representing big health insurance and big pharma are pouring $1,000,000/day into congresssional coffers. Seems to me a ‘salon’ is a bit redundant?
Weymouth is saying the fliers weren’t vetted before being released and that they misrepresented what she had intended.
Maybe she was just looking to get her crib renovated for a couple of mill and her plan was a means of creative financing. Like they say…”Gas, grass, or ass — nobody rides for free”.
Weymouth is saying the fliers weren’t vetted before being released and that they misrepresented what she had intended. Everyone is appalled that WaPo tried to sell “access.â€
So everyone basically agrees that they’re whores, but they contend that the price has been misreported. Lovely.
The Washington Whore. Not only a whore but a cheap whore. What a waste of perfectly good trees. Their reputation rests on the sole fact that Watergate was famous. Katharine Graham did it strictly because Pat Nixon referred to her as a “yid” when Richard Nixon was a representative. You read Graham’s “autobiography” she mentions Pat three times when they were in Washington at the same time for over 20 years. Hell, she mentions Henry Kissinger, the war criminal, as her friend 7 times on one page.