It may not be all that surprising to media cynics out there like me that the big news yesterday was that the second most important newspaper in the country is / has been selling its access to the big players in DC and subsequent press attention. I am asking for your forgiveness in advance, because I’m about to go on a rant. If you didn’t see this coming, you haven’t been paying attention to my tweets.
To its credit, the Washington Post, on the whole by a very slim plurality, does what it is supposed to do–speak truth to power and explain to the public what is happening inside the Beltway. Thank god for reporters like Walter Pincus who have upheld the ideals of journalism while the building burns down around him.
From my perspective, this whole episode began with Dana Milbank, a loserface who “writes the Washington Sketch column about political theater in the capitol,” flipping shit because, god forbid, a reporter for the Huffington Post, a blog-based political news and opinion website (holy fuck those amateurs!), was called on by the President because he knew the question would be one from an Iranian reporter. Milbank basically said this was no different than having a ‘plant’ in the press briefing to ask a softball question, which was commonplace during the Bush years. Well, I’m sorry, Dana, that you or your WaPo and MSM colleagues didn’t find the Iranian struggle important enough to dig up some questions that real, actual Iranians might have for the president. Please, excuse the Huffington Post from doing actual journalism, just this once, okay?
What is the traditional media’s problem with blogs anyway? They do have trained reporters that write up news articles, getting as many facts as they can, finding the truth per se. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, they are likely shitting themselves over the fact that the blogs are filled with opinions, and therefore everything associated with them is poisoned with bias. I mean, opinion and news are like oil and water, right? Who the fuck would ever take a news source that published both news and opinion seriously? I guess the pages and pages (not to mention dollars and dollars) spent on condescending pundit opinions and observations is okay when the newspaper does it, because they are endowed with the divine abilitiy to separate news from opinion, by virtue of simply being the Washington Post.
video management, video solution, video streaming What’s underlying Dana Milbank’s somewhat isolated and outlier-ed asshole-ness is the Bourgeoisie concept of professional entitlement, the idea that “I deserve y because I have x.” Milbank and the mainstream media coduct their daily work counter to the kind of meritocracy any profession, especially journalism, should actually be founded upon. “I deserve to ask the POTUS questions because I’m from the fucking Washington Post, bitches!” I’m sorry if you feel like you’ve wasted your life climbing the ruthless ladder of professional journalism to get yourself into the White House Press Corps, but you don’t have to project your inadequacies on me, Hector Projector. Shit.
So we have Milbank desperately trying to hang onto his entitlement from being a Washington Post reporter (though his column doesn’t shine any truthful light on what goes on in DC, it’s basically filled with trash along the same lines as a tabloid covering Hollywood celebrities, only these are Washington DC celebrities who apparently run our lives) on week, then the next week, we have a pay-for-press scheme (via Politico):
“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate,” says the one-page flier. “Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. … Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders.”
Awesome. And it only costs $25,000 to attend. Can you possibly have less integrity? Basically, the WaPo thinks that it can hide behind it’s reputation that its a ‘reputable’ newspaper with ‘reputable’ reporters who have ‘reputable’ sources. Yeah. Right. This is the unraveling of the main stream media; of newspapers specifically, but notions about what constitutes professional journalism generally.
When you add it all up, there’s no way you come out of this story and believe the Post when it says the newsroom maintains its independence from the marketing department. It’s bullshit. Every one of the children of privilege working for the Post is compromised. How can you take any report the Post does about Health Care seriously, now? Were they paid to write the story? Even if they never take a dime to write a story, I don’t think I can take any story at face value, ever again, and neither should anyone else.
Juxtaposed to Milbank’s whining, what we have here is a shit-ton of hypocrisy. The left hand of the Post thinks that reporting should be left to serious professionals because the work of the media is serious business, while the right hand is wining and dining the power players, essentially selling its reputation as a serious institution to the highest bidder. Fuck That. This is how democracy dies.
The butt of all this is that now the WaPo is now the butt of all journalism jokes. Even Robert Gibbs joked about it for a while. Any report or story that seems fishy ad infinitum from the Washington Post, there’s gonna be a joke, like this one at the end of the abbreviated pundit roundup on Daily Kos:
A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration’s public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations.
For a small fee, you can come over for dinner and we can discuss whether to post more stories like this. Nota Bene: the dinner has been canceled because of an overzealous publicist.
The paper’s credibility has been waning since the infamous lead up to the Iraq War; now it’s non-existant. We must now treat the Washington Post with the same skepticism reserved previously to obviously biased and compromised news sources like partisan blogs and Fox News.
Washington Post? Get back in line. You need to earn your spot again, if you ever deserved it.
