Lexus screenshot from here.
Katherine Weymouth pleasant-collegial-nonadversarial-home-front screenshot from here.
Prius screenshot from here.$$$
If you'd been invited, for a price closer and only slightly above a frills-free Prius, you could have bought into a HUMMER of an idea, (if only those other bad press guys hadn't spiked it before it hit the showroom).
The Wall Street Journal bitingly described new WaPo Publisher Katherine Weymouth's HUMMER of an idea, this way:
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 cancelled 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.
Read the rest at the WSJ.
The WSJ item, at the quote end, prominently mentions,"the coming of the health-care debate," = my healthcare at risk, your healthcare at risk, the struggles between an entrenched body of "was-and-is" status quo mongers vs. a claimed and promised will toward service in office to bring "change;" all reported by a fearless, impartial, unimpeachable press - to us, the public, daily, to keep us intelligently informed of truth vs. fiction.
Attaboy, Katie.
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When the thing did go splat all over everything, WaPo Publisher Weymouth published an apology of the sort, "It was the fault of the Kitchenaid, spinning things too loose too fast - one of the kids did it, unvetted. (However, the recipe still piques my interest and I do not foreclose a new embodiment of the dish being tried again.)"
Mark Dayton called DC a "cesspool."
During the six-year Senate term when he was passing through. Norm Coleman had his six years "in office;" suits, Truman committee chairmanship without seeing any war profiteering beyond looking at pre-war oil-for-food dealings, his housing, his Kazeminy, and all. Now we're sending Al. Go Al. Be a Wellstone, not a quitter, not a sleaze magnet. A Wellstone, please.
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The story is getting a lot of coverage from a lot of outlets, but the hat-tip goes to Sibel Edomonds, for where I first saw the story on her 123 Real Change blog (go there, take the survey). You can get a spectrum of stuff about this body-part-in-a-wringer story via Google News, this google. And don't yell gender bias, for the other gender I'd have called it a stepped-on-his-body-part story. Which the WaPo newsroom editor denies doing, although like Publisher Weymouth he did no workproduct-based vetting of "the marketing people" either. I suppose neither of those two WaPo bosses was suspecting from his/her experience that marketing folks can sometimes overly embellish and slant a presentation; with prior vetting, hence, advisible. Do you get the feeling the marketing, even unvetted, would have sufficed had the fan not loaded up so fully? That's speculative, of course.