Oops...! We've been fingered...! Guess it's time to try to spin our way out of it...!

what a bunch of fresh, steaming, fly-encrusted horseshit...

Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth yesterday canceled plans for a series of policy dinners at her home after learning that marketing fliers offered corporate underwriters access to Post journalists, Obama administration officials and members of Congress in exchange for payments as high as $250,000.

"Absolutely, I'm disappointed," Weymouth said in an interview. "This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."

The fliers were approved by a top Post marketing executive, Charles Pelton, who said it was "a big mistake" on his part and that he had done so "without vetting it with the newsroom."

[...]

Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said he was "appalled" by the plan. "It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase," Brauchli said. The proposal "promises we would suspend our usual skeptical questioning because it appears to offer, in exchange for sponsorships, the good name of The Washington Post."

The Post Co. fliers offered an "intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth." The fliers, which said participants would be charged $25,000 to sponsor a single salon and $250,000 to underwrite an annual series of 11 sessions, were reported yesterday by Politico.

ok... take a deep breath... clear your head... take a moment to look off in the distance and let those muddled thoughts settle... ready...? now, let's get really, really real...

these protestations of being "appalled," of "disappointment," of not wanting to do "any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom," are disingenuous in the extreme... pelton would have never done something that involved sending fliers to d.c. movers and shakers under the wapo banner advertising no less than dinner at the house of the wapo ceo and publisher unless ALL the details had been ok'd by said ceo and publisher in advance... no marketing honcho is going to put his career on the line by doing something like that unilaterally unless he's purposely angling to get fired... no siree... they blew it, big-time, and now pelton has become the whole burnt offering sacrificed on the altar of "to hell with you, i'm saving my OWN ass..."

patético...

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