Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
It seems the Washington Post is not alone in offering to help lobbyists and business interests to get special access to political leaders. Politico reports that the Wall Street Journal and The Economist have held similar events.
The fact is the Post's clumsy effort to make money on its brand name and market its access to the powerful was a belated effort to follow in the steps of at least two other prominent news organizations: The Wall Street Journal and the Economist magazine.The Journal, for instance, is charging a $7,500 for its two-day CEO Council in November, an elite gathering that will include the paper's top editors and high-profile speakers like Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. And for a few thousand dollars, The Economist can open the door to intimate off-the-record meet-and-greets with world leaders.
The Economist's event is particularly disturbing:
The Economist has scheduled two off-the-record summits this year bringing together government officials and business leaders together in Mexico and Brazil. The magazine's website lists three aims for the summits, one of which is to foster an off-the-record, high-level debate between Mexican business leaders and key ministers on the policies and strategies of the current government. The price for the Mexico and Brazil summits are not listed, but prices for other events run anywhere from a few hundred dollars to nearly $4,000."The events are off the record because we have found it is the best way for our delegates and host governments to get value from the discussion," an Economist spokesperson wrote in an e-mail. "It also explicitly means that the event will not be covered by The Economist.
But isn't that exactly the kind of thing that the media should explicitly be covering? If you're not the press and you're organizing this kind of off-the-record discussion, your first concern should be what the lobbyists and the government can get out of it. But if you are the press, your first concern -- your only concern -- should be informing the public about the substance of such meetings. The job of the media is to act as watchdog, not power broker or pimp.
Politics
Comments
Boys and girls, can you say "influence peddling"?
Posted by: Squiddhartha | July 9, 2009 9:19 AM
Fox beat them all to it. Their staff IS the former republican administration.
Posted by: rpsms | July 9, 2009 9:30 AM
Eh. The Economist has never claimed to be impartial or a watchdog, unlike the WaPo. Its primary purpose is making rich people feel knowledgeable and virtuous.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | July 9, 2009 9:35 AM
What do you expect? It worked so well for Darth Cheney when he had Big Oil help him with working out energy policy. I forget who his helpers were...oh, that's right I never DID know.
Posted by: democommie | July 9, 2009 9:37 AM
I'm pretty certain I also read The Atlantic does the same. What pisses me off is that I have paid subscriptions to the WSJ, Economist, and Atlantic.
While I've known for 25 years you couldn't trust the WSJ Editorial pages staff, I now wonder whether any of their straight news staff attend these functions. I do rely on them to provide a full contextual report of the issues surrounding the stories they choose to report, in fact my ability to make wise investment decisions depends on the accuracy of their reporting. I assume the same is true for nearly all their subscribers who participate to some degree in how they allocate their investment portfolio.
Posted by: Michael Heath | July 9, 2009 9:39 AM
What colour is the sky in your world? Sounds like I'd like to live there... Unfortunately, in this world, "the press" are a bunch of privately-owned commercial entities whose first and only concern is to make as much money as possible. Speaking truth to power is rarely profitable. Pimping for power always is.
This is not a case of "a few bad apples" or occasional lapses in journalistic ethics. It's a fundamental systemic issue which is built right into the very foundations of our entire society. Profit trumps all other considerations - truth, ethics, decency, human life, the lot.
Posted by: Dunc | July 9, 2009 9:42 AM
@Dunc
Good ethics is good business. That's particularly true when your product is information, where trust is paramount. Poor ethical choices may net you a temporary gains. But in the long run it's unsustainable.
Posted by: Abby Normal | July 9, 2009 11:49 AM
@Abby Normal:
Take a good look around you and tell me how many business leaders you think are concerned with long-term sustainability. Here's a hint: we're in the biggest recession since the '30s, largely caused by an extreme focus on short-term movements of the stock market by the leaders of some of the biggest businesses in the world.
Long term sustainability doesn't matter to these people. They want as much money as possible, right now. Once they've got it, they can walk away if the business turns to shit. They've got theirs.
Posted by: Dunc | July 9, 2009 11:56 AM
I won't pretend that they're common, but I know a few who were saying in 2006 that things were heating up too much and it couldn't last -- and they started then to make sure that their employees and their stockholders would come through.
At least one has managed to avoid any layoffs, in serious part thanks to planning for bad times when times were roaring.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | July 9, 2009 12:50 PM
That's exactly what I'm talking about Dunc. Those businesses sacrificed sustainability for quick profit. The officers who ran them were snake oil salesmen, fleeing town ahead of the angry mob. Some escaped, others did not. But the important thing for this discussion is that their actions created a demand among investors for safeguards against such selfish and destructive practices. Businesses which provide those safeguards will thrive, while those that don't will flounder.
I'm not saying that poor ethics don't happen in a business, only that, barring outside interference, it's a self-correcting problem.
Posted by: Abby Normal | July 9, 2009 1:12 PM
Abby Normal:
It is "self correcting"'; however, the country as a whole suffers while the people who caused the problem often walk away with a bundle of cash. It would be nice if they could suffer a bit too. I'm just spitballing here, but do you think public hangings or drawing and quartering are off the table as far as the Fed and the SEC are concerned?
Posted by: demoommie | July 9, 2009 7:37 PM
Regarding punishing the SEC. The core problem regarding the SEC is more about those that oversee the SEC than the SEC itself. The SEC is filled primarily with lawyers insuring that the paperwork is filled out correctly regarding corporate governance. What they lack, which to me is astonishing, is forensic accountants that are capable of monitoring the legitimacy of trades and the integrity of the markets they chartered with overseeing.
Whether Bush decimated this capability or it never existed I do not know, but there are zero formal watchdogs over acts like Bernie Madoff pulled-off. Here's a fascinating 60 Minutes segment making this point.
Posted by: Michael Heath | July 9, 2009 8:18 PM
If it's self-correcting, how come it's getting worse? Rupert Murdoch's News Group doesn't seem likely to go out of business any time soon...
It could be self-correcting if there was something approximating a genuine free market operating, with lots of producers in genuine competition and relatively low barriers to entry. However, in this case we have a relatively small number of producers, frequently acting in in "co-opetition", and absolutely massive barriers to entry. No matter how bad their ethics, they're not going away any time soon.
Posted by: Dunc | July 10, 2009 5:35 AM