Party With the WaPo Staff

Glenn Greenwald has been tireless is his criticism of the establishment media. Essentially, he accuses them of lacking a spine and abandoning any pretenses of being adversarial towards government. He often quotes David Gregory of NBC News:

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say 'this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this,' that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role." (Emphasis his.)

Last month he wrote "The Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media" in which he decried the firing of the Post's Dan Froomkin, who was an old school adversarial journalist.

But wait – there's more!



Now Politico is reporting that the Post had plans for a gala cotillion where, for prices starting at $25,000, lobbyists could have a little pas de deux with its reporters, editors, and "those powerful few":

Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

So much for an adversarial Washington Post. The funny thing was that this came to light because of a lobbyist.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."