Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit links to this eye-popping scoop ...
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.
And it’s a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.
A stunning development, if true. Let's hear the other side fromt the Posties. But I can promise that no one at my newspaper (The Washington Times) would allow the standards and ethics to degenerate into an fire sale of influence brokering. Yuck.
Postscript:
-- Jennifer Harper has followed up on the controversial conversation "salon" being offered by The Washington Post publisher: The Washington Post is downplaying any wrongdoing for revelations that Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth would host lobbyists and association executives in her home for off-the-record conversations with officials from the Obama administration, lawmakers and Post editorial staff.
Details in tomorrow's Washington Times at www.washtimes.com
