Krikey! Here I am worried about a little interpretive inaccuracy at the NYT when we have Katharine Weymouth selling influence at the Washington Post.
Publisher Weymouth with Exec Ed Marcus Brachli need to check the air conditioning in their respective offices because bad air must be coming in. It is certainly going out. The idea was to get journalists, “lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations” – yes, I know the list is right there in Andrew Alexander’s Post article I just linked to above. But I just had to write it out for myself. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.
A so-called sponsor would be blessed with the opportunity to pay 25 or 250 Gs (depending on your source) for the Post’s power to fill chairs with these special folks in the same room at the same time. They were going to call them “salons.” (Just down another alley I want to meet whoever came up with that.) Salons about important stuff, one assumes, moderated by no lesser lights than Post reporters – although the reporters hadn’t been told how all this would actually work yet. By the way, just to make things perfectly clear, the doors were to be closed on or to these salons. This kind of “spirited but civil dialogue” was to be off-the-record.
Well all that makes perfect sense. Or it must to some of these people. I, however, join the throngs of the flabbergasted.
The press, and dear God, THE POST, has busted its butt cracking open this kind of bushwa for 30-plus years. We’ve tried to shed sunlight on such conversations, not sponsor them off the record for crying out loud. Or if you aren’t crying out loud you better be huddled in a corner somewhere coughing out your best Kurtzian whisper, “The horror. The horror.”
