Posted: 2009 August 01, Saturday 12:15
By George Merlis
I was sharpening my knife with intent to eviscerate MSNBC for selling its “Morning Joe” show to Starbucks, when the Washington Post pulled off an ethical lapse that made the MSNBC sell-out look like a minor typographical error in a literary masterpiece.
The Washington Post and a Cuppa Joe
Let’s start with the fact that these are difficult times for the mass media. The print media are suffering especially grievous damage from triple-whammy:
1. Internet competition (including the free give-away online of the same content they sell on paper).
2. Recession-reduced advertising revenue.
3. A dumbed-down public that can’t tell opinion from fact and thinks the death of a faded musical star who hasn’t had a hit in a decade or helicopter video of police cruisers chasing a car down a freeway is news.
In these trying times, the Washington Post found something else to sell besides advertising: its ethics.
Some background: There has always been the danger of journalists getting too close to their sources, especially powerful sources. More than a few reporters fell under the spell of the ultimate aphrodisiac, political power. In some cases the seduction was physical as well intellectual, with some very highly visible star reporters dating -- and in some cases marrying -- high-ranking political figures. A top government official often need only to ask a reporter, “And what do you think?” to gain control of the situation. President Lyndon Johnson was a champion at co-opting the media through flattery and attention. Once, when a national anchor announced at the end of his broadcast that he would be off for a week because he was going to Vietnam for a first-hand look at the war, Johnson phoned him the instant he got off the air and invited him to come to the White House for a personal briefing on the conflict. Naturally, the journalist went to the White House where Johnson personally laid on an abundance of praise, flattery and misinformation.
In my book, How to Master the Media, I wrote about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat buttering up Barbara Walters during an interview by congratulating her on her million-dollar ABC News anchoring contract (the very first seven-figure anchor deal in broadcasting history). I also wrote: “I saw an interview with the novelist Nora Ephron during which she castigated the Washington press corps for writing or broadcasting puffball stories about President George W. Bush. To turn the reporters, she said, Bush ‘complimented them on their tie.’ Lest you think Ms. Ephron's satirical side was exaggerating, in 2006, during a presidential news conference, Bush complimented a CNN reporter on his “sharp suit” and another reporter on her choice of blouse. The questions that followed the sartorial compliments were not particularly tough.”
An enduring Washington iconic institution of the cozy power elite-journalism axis were salons held by the late Katharine Graham, the Washington Post’s publisher. At these gatherings, Washington’s political princes, barons and dukes rubbed shoulders with Post editors and top reporters. This despite the fact that In her 1997 autobiography, Graham wrote about her late husband’s close ties to Lyndon Johnson and noted that such personal relationships between politicians and journalists were now unacceptable.
Fast forward to the present: Having fallen upon hard times the Post decided to sell what it had been giving away: salons featuring journalists and the politically influential. The paper’s marketing department offered lobbyists sponsorships of smaller, more intimate dinners with reporters and political leaders at the home of Mrs. Graham’s granddaughter and namesake, Katharine Weymouth, the current Washington Post publisher. Sponsoring a series of these dinners could cost influence-peddlers a quarter of a million bucks. The editorial department got wind of the scheme, protested loudly and the intimate dinners were dropped. In a letter to readers, Weymouth alibied the solicitation by writing that the idea was “to make news and inform audiences.”
I beg to differ. If the idea was to make news, then the sessions would not have been off-the-record.
The publisher wrote, “Our mistake was to suggest that we would hold and participate in off-the-record dinners with journalists and power brokers paid by a sponsor.”
Again, I beg to differ. The Post’s mistake was not to “suggest” but to solicit paid sponsorship by lobbyists of such sessions. “We will not organize such events,” Weymouth continued but then went on to write, “I do believe there is a legitimate way to hold such events.”
No, there isn’t.
Oh, and about MSNBC’s Morning Joe” and Starbucks.... I’ll deal with that next time around. Suffice it to say I’m going to give the last word on that story to Jon Stewart.
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