By Thomas Frank - Wall Street Journal
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 papers publisher Katharine Weymouth participants were promised a collegial evening with Obama administration officials Congress members business leaders advocacy leaders and other select minds.
The papers 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 organizations CEO or executive director literally to the table for a mere $25000.
Even in Washington its unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to alter the debate as the Posts flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the citys 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 journalisms zealous guardian of professional rectitude with its hand apparently out for a little bit of baksheesh. Here was the definer of the capitals 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 worlds 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 papers brass who blamed one another after the embarrassing story broke and immediately cancelled the get-together. The flier hadnt 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 citys 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 Posts own confused relationship with power is also often summarized by reference to dinner parties in this case the ones given by Ms. Weymouths grandmother Katharine Graham.
The great men of Washington up until the Nixon administration came regularly to Mrs. Grahams 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. Grahams legendary dinners today is as a revenue stream.
Instead of course what the Posts proprietors did was hasten the day of reckoning.
If I had $25000 to spare Id advise them to forget about befriending the A-list. Stick to the public -- what you might call the Z-list.
