Washington Post invites the powerful to write their own news - with no editors to check their planted stories

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander has failed to connect two serious reader complaints of uncorrected "Pay to Play" journalism.

One scandal occurs where Post owner Katharine Weymouth invites politicians and power brokers to an off-the-record party at her home (she called them "Salons" as if it were a bona fide Algonquin Rountable). The Ombudsman finally reveals on Sunday that for weeks before the event, reporters and editors objected to the plan that, "for a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations."

• There is no explanation of why the salons would be off-the-record, a special type of meeting where the speakers are not responsible for what they say and the reporters agree not to use what it said. It is much more restrictive than merely agreeing to be an anonymous source.
• There was no explanation of why it was going to be paid for by the industry that was covered by the event.
• Although the editor apologized for the way it was portrayed by Marketing, there is no explanation of why Marketing would be involved in the event if it were truly an informational meeting.

The second scandal is that the information at the Salons, as well as other pay-to-play and favored politicians, can further influence the content of the Post because there are so few editors and fact-checkers that errors are now at unacceptable levels. What is the Post's plan to address this, you might ask: Telling readers to Get Used to It.

"Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli did not disagree that more errors have appeared lately.... Post managers have few choices but to cut staff while restructuring for the future.... Small errors will continue. Loyal Post readers should continue to note them when they're small and complain loudly when they're large. But I hope they also show some patience and understanding. "

The cuts are big and small, and rightly have a devastating effect on the Post's credibility. As another example, June 8th's Travel section had photos from Bigstockphoto.com and the Florida Department of Tourism. No Post photographers took any of the pictures on the front page of the section.

Missing evidence in the US presentation

As it did in the run-up to the first US debacle in the Middle East of this century, the Washington Post is putting the pro-War propaganda on Syria and Iran on the front page. Why? War sells papers! Unlike the past, it does include information that challenges the administration. However the facts are buried today on page A12. Here it is: "Missing Evidence in the U.S. Presentation:"

"The Bush administration this week asserted that an Israeli airstrike in Syria Sept. 6 destroyed a nuclear reactor being constructed with the assistance of North Korea... The intelligence community said it had ... "medium confidence" that North Korea was involved, and "low confidence" that Syria had a related weapons program.... The full range of U.S. intelligence information on the site is unclear, but skeptics have pointed to several key uncertainties:

• No fuel,
• No repocessing,
• No electrical power lines, and
• No weapons design.

It sounds like my golf game: no grip, no stance, no backswing and no follow-through.

Click here for the full-size graphic.

Giuliani: another one bites the dust?

This week, Mitt Romney was outed as cruel to animals when he exposed what should have been the beloved family dog to unimaginable stress in a crate on top of his car during a long highway road trip.

Today the Post reports more problems for another Republican Presidential hopeful, Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani, still trying to take advantage of being christened "America's mayor" not by New Yorkers but by Time magazine, has already lost momentum due to the troubling stories from the NYFD. Now another story in the Freakonomics vein shows that his claims of reducing crime in NYC are mostly bogus. Here's the report and a clip from WaPo below:

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

Scooter Libby sentenced for manipulating news -- and WaPo still protects Tom Davis

NYT, June 5 — I. Lewis Libby Jr., once one of the most powerful men in government as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was sentenced today to two and a half years [30 months] in prison for lying to a grand jury and F.B.I. agents who were investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative during a fierce debate over the war in Iraq.

What Scooter Libby did was a serious, insidiuous, anti-democratic control of information, and WaPo itself continues to ignore political corruption in exchange for Access Journalism.

Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The Scooter Libby trial disclosed what the press and administration already know: for this administration, a critical part of its media dis-information campaign includes controlling the timing of press reports. If they can't stop a story before it publishes, the next best thing is controlling when a story publishes.

The Post is absolutley giddy when it reports on how the NYT and Judith Martin were involved in this game, but silent on it's own failure to cover corruption for its own Access Journalism. In other words, politicians don't have to schedule a "Saturday night Massacre." The Post will schedule it for them.

WAPO: "With a candor that is frowned upon at the White House, explained Cheney's former top press assistant," Cathie Martin, explained how important it was to influence timing of news reports critical of politicians.

"Fewer people pay attention to it later on Friday," Martin testified. "And in our view, fewer people are paying attention on Saturday, when it's reported."

Examples include not only Bob Woodward's involvement in keeping the cover up going in Plamegate, on black hole prisons, and the Ford interview criticizing Bush. They include the Post's baseball buddy, Tom Davis.

• The first of several Post stories by Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow on Tom Davis and his own campaign finance scandal followed this formula. It ran on Friday, July 28, 2006 before the July 4th weekend. Washington, DC was empty by then, and most holiday travelers were on the road. Tom Davis couldn't have asked for better scheduling if he had selected the date himself.
  
• Because it's customary to complete a series before running the first article, the following articles in this entire series should have been written by that July date. Nevertheless, the next article in the series would not run until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. During those 4 months, his election was over. Congress had recessed, again, the city was empty, and most holiday travelers were going through airport security. Davis must have wondered how this good fortune could continue.
  
• But it did last last. The third installment did not run until almost two weeks later, and on a Saturday. Saturday is one of the lowest circulation days for most newspapers.

Additional stories in the Post on Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay don't even mention that Davis was one of very few Congressman singled out for donations from Jack Abramoff's tribal clients, and they don;t mention that he's one of only three Congressmen who received campaign contributions from Abramoff. They don't mention his admission that he knew about Walter Reed in 2004, and that he's named on the famous Lurita Doan GSA slides of candidates who should received campaign help from federal employees.

These aren't neo-cons who are targeted by the administration. It's reputable journalists who seem otherwise credible. They fall for flattery.

Radar Contact: "It's Our Best Format"

At Libby's trial, Judith Miller's testimony showed how the administration and the press combine forces for access journalism:

In a steady but slightly nervous voice, Miller described how her relationship with Libby began: with a bit of flattery [of her writing].... Miller recalled Libby saying that "he liked my reporting ..."

"You look like a lawyer to me, honey." Taxi's Louie DePalma (Danny DeVito) on the pick up line he uses in a bar he knows where women go after they've learned they flunked the Bar exam.

When she "expressed a desire" for regular conversations, Libby said "he would prefer not to see his name in print," Miller said. "We could continue meeting as long as I would identify him as an administration official or senior administration official." She readily agreed.

So Libby would combat these leaks by leaking to Miller, she explained in a tone that indicated this was the most natural thing in the world.