Posted on 07/05/2009 5:46:13 AM PDT by La Lydia
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said yesterday that a hasty time frame, haphazard planning and miscommunication led to the release of a promotional flier that inaccurately described the newspaper's plans for a series of sponsored "salons" with influential insiders.
"We decided to throw this particular event very recently," Weymouth said in an interview. "We said, 'Let's not wait. Let's pick a date and let's go for it.' When you rush like that, you make mistakes."
Weymouth said she takes responsibility for the controversy, and she took the rare step of writing a letter to readers, which appears today on the Op-Ed page [A19]...
The first of the dinners, billed as salons, was to be held July 21 and focus on health-care policy. Weymouth canceled the dinner after Politico.com disclosed the details of what was being offered to potential sponsors in the flier...
Critics have accused The Post of abusing its journalistic integrity and of attempting to profit from selling access to powerful and influential people...
However, as Weymouth described it, the first salon was a somewhat hastily planned affair. Pelton suggested July 21 as the first date. After checking her schedule, Weymouth agreed. Invitations were sent using her business e-mail address early last week, although Weymouth said she was out of town and never saw the language....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Libs think they can lie their way out of anything... Sadly, far roo many believe them.
They finally put the red light in the window. In old days they called themselves “escorts”.
Thing has been going on for decades, but the lobbist would take out full page ads and Katherine Graham would invite them over to dinner with reporters and administration officials and congressional leaders.
They paid off the politicians with flattering coverage.
"Long before Wikipedia, the term "source greaser" (or, for the dainty, "beat sweetener") referred to a favorable news article about a public official, published in the hope of inducing cooperation in the future. Source greasers appear most often in the first few months of a new administration. However, this is the first time an editor has been assigned to flatter administration officials full time.
""Obama has changed the rules," he says. "Everyone he appoints is so wonderful that there aren't enough positive words to describe all of them. My job is to centralize the sucking up and make sure that each subject gets a fair share of the available adjectives."
Ah! So, it wasn’t the attempt to sell their soul to the devil that was wrong.
It was just the fact that the word leaked out beyond the devil that was the mistake.
Gotcha.
The explanation is pure BS. She got caught. That’s the only thing that put a stop to it.
Rhett Butler: You’re like the thief who isn’t the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he’s going to jail.
I love that line...
Yes. Where is John Mitchell when we need him to describe what happened?
fall on your sword then b!tch... 
Don't kid yourself.
Other print MSM will forgive and forget in a matter of hours.
Now, if was the Washington Times, WSJ or the NY Post........ NYT's front page above the fold for a week.
The disgraced newspaper needs branding ...
WaPogate
No, I think the Wapo will continue to pay for this for a long time. Did you see the Twitter hash tag #WapoDeals? Hilarious and many of the tweets about it were posted by Libs. WaPo is a laughingstock. Every time they write something, someone is going to ask who paid whom for it. And I think they are going to have to kiss goodbye this new “revenue stream.” The greatest of all ironies is that they were outed by a lobbyist.
I haven't followed this closely, so this answers my main question. I couldn't figure out how they would get the 'powerful insiders' to attend these things without bribery of some type.
How was this paper so confident they can produce members of the administration? I'd like to see someone look into who exactly would have attended to be swayed...but alas journalism is dead in this country.
This helps explain the MSM being in the tank for the Dems. The Dems are just a lot more amenable to flattery.
fom her letter, it looks like THE POST!! was getting the money!(The $50,000.00 from Kaiser Permanente for the July 21 party). I still think we need to know where the sponsorship money was going...
Yes, as far as we know, the Post was getting the money, the lobbyists were getting the access. The BO administration was going to get pure, criticism-free coverage, no questions asked, no matter what was being done. So in a sense the Post was selling its news content, indirectly, to the highest bidder. This is why it is such a slap in the face to respectable journalism. See the Kinsley article I referred to earlier.
Thank God they’ve maintained their objectivity. -s-
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