Post publisher apologizes for paid dinner plan ($25,000 per head)

AP ^ | 07/05/09

[TigerLikesRooster]

Post publisher apologizes for paid dinner plan

Washington Post publisher apologizes for plan to hold paid dinners with officials, journalists

On Sunday July 5, 2009, 6:59 am EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Washington Post's publisher apologized to readers Sunday for a plan to charge business leaders and lobbyists for intimate dinner discussions with government officials and the newspaper's journalists.

A flier surfaced last week promoting a plan to charge $25,000 to sponsor one of a series of dinner parties that would include off-the-record conversations with Post journalists and access to Washington insiders. The series was canceled Thursday.

[poindexter]

One can only wonder how much of this has been going on before they got caught.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Probably every week.:-) Who knows? Without such extra revenue, WaPo might have been broke by now just like NYT.

[maggief]

WaPoGate

[2harddrive]

ONCE AGAIN, the government has been found to be selling itself to the highest biddders, aided and abetted by the Mighty Media Monolith. And yet we criticize prostitutes!

[angkor]

To paraphase publisher Katherine Wemouth’s ridiculous mea culpa:

“I’m ‘a Madame’, not a Madam. And this was to look like ‘a salon’, not a brothel.”

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

They might as well change their name to Government Media, this to go along with the new trend: Government Motors, Government Medical, etc.

[freekitty]

I bet she is still going to do it; if she hasn’t already.

[tiki]

I imagine that it happened but there was no written policy, just people who greased their palms regularly. I bet their financial institution wanted some proof for their cash flow so they wrote up a formal agreement.

[freekitty]

Obama and Co are worse liars than Bill and Hillary if you can believe that. They should be known as the “Liars Campaign”.

[angkor]

And also: "We were not selling the permanent affections of our employees for money, nor were were trafficking in human flesh to 'elite' Washington 'power brokers'. Rather, we intended to provide the intimate attentions of the Post's 'esteemed objective journalists' for only an hour or two, and in my lux and swanky downtown pad. What kind of perversions business those paying 'power brokers' and my flourish of strumpets team of 'esteemed objective journalists' were to conduct in the privacy of my living room is their own private business."

[xcamel]

Lots of CYA lies going on there...

[DieHard the Hunter]

Isn’t “Influence Peddling” a crime in the United States? A form of Racketeering? If so, what are its parameters? If not, shouldn’t it be?

[TigerLikesRooster]

In U.S., too many rackets making too much money these days. Rackets include pols. They become too big to be investigated and prosecuted, IMHO.

[libertylover]

Des-PIC-able!

[reg45]

Illinois style “Pay-to-Play” comes to Washington.

[Seaplaner]

Washington Post publisher apologizes for plan to hold paid dinners with officials, journalists

Translation:

All meetings between Obama officials and "news" media and lobbyists will continue to remain clandestine, or...ahem..."under-the-table" from now on.

.

[Godwin1]

The less interesting thing here is the venality and greed—or perhaps the financial desperation—of Post's senior management. The more interesting dimension is the seamless, interlocking connections between the Post and this Administration. The Post promised to deliver not only it's “journalists”, but also White House officials. And why not? After all, they are all on the same team, with the Post, like the AP and the major networks, serving as little more than an extension of the White House press operation. We are witnessing a marriage of government and media previously unknown outside totalitarian nations. Thank God for the internet

[TigerLikesRooster]

Yeah, they have virtual “WaPo Land” on Cyberspace. They can rub elbows there. To play “WaPo Land,” you have to buy minimal option for dress, shoes, and accessories. It will require 25,000 points, and each point costs a dollar for purchase.:-)

[tobyhill]

Too late. The Washington Post violated the Lobbyist Disclosure Act of 1995. They offered lobbyist contacts with high ranking White House officials that totaled over $6,000 and they weren’t registered to do so.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Whoa. Wait a minute.........I can CHARGE dinner guests!?!?

[ArtyFO]

I seem to remember George will having such a dinner in January and inviting Obama and others to it. Didn’t the Post already have such dinners last year. This idea has been floated before.

[Hildy]

The difference being is that Will did not charge money. That’s what we’re talking about.

[Chode]

the best political WHORES and L$M MONEY CAN BUY...

[lilylangtree]

Not accepted. She’s only apologizing because she got caught. WaPO has been doing this since before Katherine Graham was in charge.

[Lmo56]

“Bout friggin’ time she apologized - this has been going on for three days ...

BTW, Kathryn, could you submit your resignation and ... pass the Grey Poupon, please ...

[Recovering_Democrat]

Well, the apology was made. Liberals say sorry, and now it is time to move on. Over. Finished. Never bring it up again. This is history. Any attempt to resurrect it from now on will be portrayed as the behavior of vengeful hatemongers.

Now, if liberals continually bring up the sins of a conservative, well, that is okay.

[DPMD]

If it looks like a bribe, sounds like a bribe, smells like a bribe...

The Post has graduated from being a government hooker to being its pimp.

[tsmith130]

"I want to apologize for a planned new venture that went off track and for any cause we may have given you to doubt our independence and integrity," Publisher Katharine Weymouth said in a letter that appeared in the newspaper's op-ed section Sunday.

Honey, we doubted your independence and integrity well before any official flyer went out announcing it.

[angkor]

>>>>> We are witnessing a marriage of government and media previously unknown outside totalitarian nations. <<<<<

Wrong.

Completely not the case.

The press has always been corrupt. Always.

The “big lie” has been to convince contemporary America that they are “objective journalists,” the solons of truth and justice, and are incorruptible.

When the truth is that you can buy a journo with a free steak dinner and a pretty secretary.

[kcvl]

Only because they got caught!

[kcvl]

Elizabeth Morris Graham, commonly known as Lally Weymouth is an American journalist and newspaper heiress, currently Senior Editor of Newsweek magazine.

Lally Graham Weymouth

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/partypictures/2006/10_03_06/images/philharmonic/Joseph-Cohen-and-Lally-Grah.jpg

http://www.nndb.com/people/458/000051305/lallyweymouth02.jpg

Lally Weymouth (born Elizabeth Morris Graham, July 3, 1943) is an American journalist who is the senior editor of Newsweek magazine.

She is an heir to the Washington Post media fortune, whose properties include Newsweek.

She is the only daughter of Katharine Graham and Philip Graham, both of whom were publishers of the Post.

From 1968 to 1969, Weymouth worked for Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation.

She worked as a freelance journalist and contributing editor from 1977 to 1983 for such publications as New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, and Parade. From 1983 to 1986 she was a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.

She was a contributing editor at Newsweek from 1998 to 2001. Since 2001, as senior editor at Newsweek, she regularly interviews celebrities for both Newsweek and the Post.

[kcvl]

Katherine Graham was the sister-in-law of Bob Graham, who was DEMOCRAT Governor of Florida and a long-time U.S. Senator.

Katherine Graham - After a short romance, on June 5, 1940, she married Philip Graham, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a clerk for Stanley Reed and later Felix Frankfurter, both of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Graham’s husband became publisher of the Post in 1946, and continued in that position and then as the head of the Washington Post Company as it expanded into television and purchased Newsweek magazine.

After several years of erratic behavior — sullen, depressed and introverted times as well as magnanimous, hard-working, brilliant times, later diagnosed as bipolar disorder — Philip Graham suffered a nervous breakdown.

At a newspaper conference in Phoenix, Arizona, Philip Graham, either drunk, having a nervous breakdown, or both, told the audience that President Kennedy was having an affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer.

HE HAD TO HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (OR DRUNK) TO TELL THE TRUTH!!!

Philip Graham was taken to the private Chestnut Lodge psychiatric facility near Washington D.C.

TO SHUT HIM UP!!!

[kcvl]

Sen. Bob Graham remembers Katharine Graham (his sister-in-law)

17-JUL-01

Sen. Bob Graham on Tuesday remembered his sister-in-law Katharine Graham with awe _ for her strength as a journalism icon as publisher of The Washington Post and her role as a loving family member.

“Her passion for The Post, her strength as a leader and her commitment to the highest standards of journalism, helped build her newspaper into her ideal,” Graham said. “Many of the ideas that shaped the last 40 or 50 years in this nation were born, then argued over, deconstructed and reconstructed around her dining table.

[GOPJ]

Weymouth's letter said the paper was planning dinners but including "firm parameters" that gave sponsors no control over content and no special access to its journalists. Reporters wouldn't be restricted from asking questions, she said.

"If the events were to be sponsored by other companies, everything would be at arm's length," she said in the letter.

The Washington Post deserves a better Publisher - she has shamed the entire industry.

[woodb01]

If it hasn't already been mentioned, I'd DEFINITELY wonder why the question isn't being asked more openly about just HOW MUCH CONTROL the Media has over these politicos and their lackeys.

Just exactly HOW did the Post think that it could even arrange this to begin with? Just exactly HOW did they get this kind of control over politicians and gov officials?

THOSE are the questions people should be asking. How the powerful became MEDIA WHORES! And how the media became POWER PIMPS!

[GOPJ]

LOL - You’re bad angkor!

[angkor]

>>> THOSE are the questions people should be asking. How the powerful became MEDIA WHORES! And how the media became POWER PIMPS! <<<<< They always have been whores. It's just that we've been fed the "esteemed objective journalist" myth for so long - and mind you by the strumpets "esteemed objective journalists" themselves - that we've forgotten that newspapering has always been in the same cultural strata as three-card Monte, comic book artistry, and carney barking.

[angkor]

Heh.

But it’s all true ;-!

[GOPJ]

We are witnessing a marriage of government and media previously unknown outside totalitarian nations. Thank God for the internet

Thank God for the internet.

[GOPJ]

This wasn’t “having a dinner” - it was “pay to play” - easily the tackiest thing anyone’s ever heard of a newspaper doing.