Politico is reporting that the Washington Post circulated a flier offering lobbyists off the record access to elected officials as well as the paper’s own reporters and editors–at a price ranging from $25,000 to $250,000.  The first access-for-sale event the Post had in mind was aimed at the topic of health care reform.  One lobbyist who received the offer apparently passed it along to a reporter  with Politico, providing the understated observation that it would be a conflict for the paper to charge for access to its health care reporting and editorial staff.  It’s not clear whether any elected officials, or administration officials, had agreed to be there, but that would certainly be disturbing, to say the least, if it’s the case.

In a post yesterday, I noted that, while there is overwhelming support for health care reform, including the public option, the fight for reform has been a difficult one, in part, because of the traditional media’s failure to accurately and fairly report on the issue.  I wrote about one Post reporter, Ceci Connolly, who has falled short of that standard.  Connolly says she was told she would be invited to the event the Politico reported on.  That’s disturbing.

The Post’s crass offer should remind us of larger problems: (1) that political access seems to be for sale to those who can afford it (and unavailable to those who cannot) and (2) traditional media types seem to have a pretty cozy relationship with the elected officials they cover, as has been noted in other contexts.

The term “follow the money” is associated with Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Nixon administration’s malfeasance at the Watergate and beyond wide open (though it’s not clear the reporters themselves came up with this term).  Woodward and Bernstein stand for the ideal that media ought to hold elected officials accountable.  The Politico story about today’s Post suggests the paper would rather connect elected officials with lobbyists, in exchange for a fee.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a conference Pat Buchanan’s group, the American Cause, recently held.  The conference featured a panelist who describes himself as a “white nationalist” and has argued that the Republican party should focus on its base: “white Americans.”  Reading about the conference and Buchanan’s organization got me curious: what else is Buchanan up to?  I went to the American Cause’s website, and started reading through Buchanan’s columns.

Turns out he is using his organization’s website to make wildly extreme, ultra-reactionary arguments against evolution and in defense of a man the Simon Wiesenthal Center says committed “unspeakable crimes” as a Nazi death camp guard.  That man is John Demjanjuk.  In 2002, a U.S. federal court found that reliable evidence supports the conclusion that Demjanjuk was an armed guard at Sobibor, a death camp where 250,000 people were murdered.   German prosecutors say they have hundreds of documents and a number of witnesses that prove Demjanjuk’s involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews in 1943.  The head of the special German office investigating Nazi crimes says there is “no doubt” Demjanjuk is responsible for these murders.  Demjanjuk was recently deported from the U.S. and is in a German prison awaiting trial on charges that he was an accessory to these 29,000 murders.

Now, it’s important to note that, in 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court threw out Demjanjuk’s conviction for war crimes committed by the notorious Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, a different death camp.  The Israeli court found that new evidence suggested Ivan the Terrible was another man–however, according to BBC News, the court was careful not to declare Demjanjuk innocent, pointing to “ample evidence that he had served as a guard in concentration camps other than Treblinka.”

I fully believe that Demjanjuk has a right to a fair trial, and he will receive one.  However, these are very serious charges, and they hardly sound frivolous.  It’s hard to say Demjanjuk is being railroaded or persecuted–unless you’re Pat Buchanan, that is.  Buchanan wrote a column in April, entitled “The True Haters”, that implicitly compares Demjanjuk to Jesus Christ.  Buchanan paints Demjanjuk as a victim of relentless persecution, focusing on the fact that Demjanjuk’s conviction in 1993 was thrown out.  Buchanan leaves out crucial points: (1) the Israeli court that threw out Demjanjuk’s conviction did not say he was “innocent” and noted there was evidence he was guilty of other crimes (2) German prosecutors say there is “no doubt” that Demjanjuk is criminally responsible for 29,000 murders, pointing to hundreds of documents and a number of witnesses backing up their case and (3) the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has been involved in the Demjanjuk case for many years, has concluded he committed unspeakable crimes during the Holocaust.

Why does Buchanan completely ignore the evidence against Demjanjuk?  Why does he paint Demjanjuk as a victim, grotesquely and bizarrely calling him “the American Dreyfus”?  (Dreyfus was a French Jewish military officer who was convicted of espionage charges against a backdrop of anti-Semitism: Dreyfus’s name stands for injustice based on prejudice against Jews).  Why did he go so far as to compare Demjanjuk to Christ, saying that Demjanjuk was the victim of “the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago“?  (This is a particularly explosive comparison, given the centuries-old slander that the Jews killed Christ: is Buchanan suggesting that the Jews are similarly trying to kill Demjanjuk?)

I can’t say what motivates Buchanan, but his tendentious defense of an accused Nazi war criminal makes me ill.  As I asked before, how is it that Buchanan is able to market himself as a mainstream commentator?

Update: hat tip to Philip Klein, who eloqently exposed Buchanan’s “vile defense” of Demjanjuk back in April.

When it comes to important change that requires political action, success never seems to be easy.  Consider womens’ suffrage, Social Security, the abolition of slavery, federal anti-discrimination laws (we’re not all the way there on these yet).  Reactionaries opposed each of these measures, and made it incredibly difficult for liberals to achieve these basic norms we now take for granted.

I guess that achieving a modern, rational health care shouldn’t be any different–and it hasn’t been.  It’s clear that there’s nothing easy about health care reform, despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly support substantial change to the health care system, including the so-called “public option”–the idea that a government insurance plan ought to compete with private insurers.

Why is it so hard to achieve something that most Americans support?  Opponents of change are skillful marketers.  While they may not have much to offer when it comes to substance, but they have proven skillful at crafting slogans that dominate debate–scary sounding terms like “socialized medicine” are trotted out at every turn.

Another thing opponents of what is essentially popular reform have going for them is the traditional media.  Media Matters is shining a much-needed light on how this is playing out.  As Media Matters points out, it’s not too much for us to ask that the media report accurately and fairly on health care reform.  Unfortunately, things aren’t working out that way at the Washington Post.  The Post’s Ceci Connolly recently wrote that Change Congress interim chief executive Adam Green was, in an interview, “hard pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan...”  Green counters that Connolly didn’t ask him about the substance of the health care reform, she asked him about the politics, and when he gave her an answer on the political front, she wrote that he had failed to answer on the substance.  (Media Matters also points out that it’s pretty easy to find an eloquent substantive argument for the public option, if that’s what Connolly was looking for–by leaving this out, she made it seem that there simply is no substantive argument for the public option).

I don’t think Connolly has any sinister motive–as Green put it, she simply doesn’t understand the debate over health care, and she falls back on comfortable, but inaccurate shibboleths: for example, she wondered why Green was “attacking [his] friends” by holding Senate Democrats accountable for taking money from insurance companies.

It may not fit Connolly’s script to acknowledge that not all Democrats are on the progressive side of the health care debate, but it happens to be reality.  As she continues to cover this critical debate, I hope that she, and the Post, will give careful consideration to the serious questions Media Matters has raised about her reporting.

The NY Times has a piece in today’s paper entitled “Journalism Rules Are Bent in News Coverage from Iran.”  The piece questions the accuracy of news reporting on recent events in Iran that is based on “anonymous Twitter messages”, blogging and “unverified videos.”  The Times piece calls this type of reporting evidence of a “publish first, ask questions later” approach to journalism.

I think it’s absolutely fair for the Times to ask questions about the sources for news coming out of Iran, but I also think they’re incorrectly suggesting that the axiom “check the source” especially applies to reports associated with new media.  Let’s not forget the Times’ failure to consider the source when it uncritically published reports by Judith Miller and others that accepted at face value the Bush administration’s misinformation about WMD in Iraq The Times ultimately conceded that its coverage of the buildup to the war in Iraq was “not as rigorous as it should have been.”  It admitted that reporting had often depended on “Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change in Iraq” whose credibility “c[a]me under increasing public debate.”  That’s putting it mildly.

I think it’s a great idea for the Times and others across the media spectrum to be skeptical, to ask questions, to consider and check the source when it comes to recent events in Iran.  I just hope that this scrutiny is not limited only to reporting that involves new media and is not limited to recent events in Iran .

Watch this:

Here’s the aftermath, via Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post:

The only thing that surprised me was when Dana turned to me after our initial sparring and called me a “dick” in a whispered tone (the specific phrase was, I believe, “You’re such a dick”). Howie Kurtz wrote on Twitter that he didn’t hear it, which is understandable — he was doing the lead-in for the next part of the segment on the ABC White House special. But it happened (I urge Howie to watch the video of the panel during the ABC intro) and it was frankly pretty odd.

That’s right, Dana Milbank - Iraq war cheerleader, Obama swimsuit questioner, beltway press douchebag - got a bit jealous and got smacked down. Maybe people like Dana is why old-media journalism is dying. I certainly wouldn’t pay to read this guy.

After the many times I’ve featured the ignorance of WaPo editorials, may I point out that it’s just useless to point out that they’re clueless, then continue giving them hits. As a parting gesture to any pretense of dignity, WaPo has fired their redeeming feature, Dan Froomkin. The voice of reason lies bleeding and dead there, and I will not be going there to give them proof of readership anymore.

Many of the rational voices I visit are in accord. The editors at WaPo create dissent by their rampant nonsense but when readers comment - usually giving real information that WaPo ignores - the editors count it as ‘popularity’. I am joining the departing horde and recommend you do the same.

…there was also sadness this week, and I’m not talking about the deaths of entertainment icons from the 1970s. I am talking about the WashingtonPost.com website, which has booted out one of the best bloggers on the web.

Dan Froomkin’s “White House Watch” column today will be the last one that appears on WashingtonPost.com. Froomkin has expressed interest in possibly moving the column elsewhere and continuing it, and I consider this a test of whether newspapers are (a.) smart enough to realize this is the way to modernize and move into the future of journalism, or (b.) dumb as a bag of hammers. WashingtonPost.com has obviously chosen the (b.) route. Because Froomkin’s column is a shining example of how newspapers could migrate from their print business model to the more interactive web-based model they need to be in to survive.

Froomkin was fired, it was announced, because his “ratings” had dropped after Obama was elected. This is utter hogwash. In the first place, his column “White House Watch” (it started as “White House Briefing” but was changed later) was dedicated to putting the executive branch under a microscope and reporting what was there. Of course, the Bush White House was more fertile ground for this, especially towards the end. But Froomkin did not back off from examining Obama’s White House, and has been severely critical of Obama’s decisions on secrecy and openness and torture and accountability.

The real reason his numbers dropped is that the editors stopped putting a link to his column on their front page. When Froomkin got progressively harder and harder to find, fewer and fewer people found him. In other words, his ratings dropped because they didn’t feature him as prominently anymore. This is the new online reality — your hit count depends on a link on the front page of the site. The more prominent, the higher your hitcount will be.

But dark suspicions have been raised (mostly by his loyal readers) that Froomkin was fired because he dared to contradict one of the very conservative op-ed writers on the Washington Post payroll (the two entities, Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com are supposedly “separate,” I should mention). The Washington Post has become a safe haven for such ultra-conservative commentators (they not only have an ex-Bush speechwriter, but they also hired William Kristol after the New York Times got tired of him being so wrong so often). So, in keeping with this conservative bent, Froomkin had to go.

This is pathetic and is an outrage. Anyone who agrees should contact the ombudsman at: ombudsman@washpost.com and let him know how you feel. [I disagree - Ruth]

What is truly pathetic is that the newspaper which a few decades ago brought down an American president is now not even worth reading anymore, because the only thing in it that isn’t the equivalent of Fox News is their cartoonist Tom Toles (who is excellent). A bastion of journalism has, quite literally (at least for me) been reduced to a cartoon. Pathetic.

Let’s see… bring down a government, sell lots of newspapers… pack the staff with neo-cons in possibly the most liberal city in America, get ready for bankruptcy. No wonder newspapers are in such trouble, if this is the way they plan their business models. (Emphasis added.)

Pathetic is one description for bringing down what used to be a heroic voice for justice, and for digging out the truth as a newspaper is supposed to do. The glory days at WaPo have been brought down, to the use of those actively destroying functional government. Deregulation has been enthroned where public interests used to reign.

This is radical overthrow of the truth, and my response is to leave.

No more hits for WaPo.

[You can see the dreadful effect of major media promoting false information by the idiotic quality of some of the winger comments sliming here.]

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Last month, the crew on Morning Joe “had a field day”, in Free Republic’s view, over the NY Times’ decision not to put a story about Nancy Pelosi accusing the CIA of lying on the front page.  Joe, Mika, and the rest were slavering over the Pelosi story, and couldn’t get enough of what they saw as the Times’ bias in burying the story on page A 20.

The Morning Joe crew are pulling a NY Times themselves when it comes to the Gov. Sanford story.  The explosive account of the Governor’s affair is all over the media, receiving prominent coverage–but not on Morning Joe.  It didn’t even make the headlines that Mika read at the top of the hour, and it took 20 minutes before anyone mentioned the story (it’s 8:20, and Mika just said they’d talk about this “after the break”).

The Morning Joe crew did the equivalent of placing the Sanford story on p. A 20–they put it on at 8:22.  Not exactly a coincidence–the Joe crew has had Sanford on a number of times, and Scarborogh has told the governor that he ought to run for president.

After a long hiatus, Air America Radio will return to the Washington, DC airwaves this summer, at 1050 AM.

If you’ve been following the saga, Air America has had its share of ups and downs. Still, it’ll be good to have them back, and here’s hoping they are here to stay. We compete online, on TV, and in print, but pretty much the one place liberals have made almost no headway is on the radio. While I’m not sure we want our own version of Rush Limbaugh, it is undeniable that conservatives spread their message effectively on this medium. It’s way beyond time we had some competition.

This morning I was listening to WaPo reporter Chris Cilizza on CSpan tell High School kids about his career in journalism. When he got to the point of insisting that although he constantly gets comments from readers telling him what an idiot he is, but the next day those same commenters are back telling him what an idiot he is, I realized that it is, indeed, the credo at that paper that reportage is not their purpose.

A few years ago, editor Hiatt claimed high popularity because of the number who comment on his editorials. Since that time, I have been very aware that the purposes of his editorial ventures was much different from what they claim.

Controversy is created by differences of opinion. What better way to produce controversy than to write what you know readers will disagree with? Since most of the readers of the WaPo region, and demographic, are educated and knowledgeable, how better produce disagreement than by making statements that are wrong, or at least ignorant?

Today, I went to WaPo to see a comment Avedon made on David Broder’s op-ed there, that she accessed through Digby. The comment was highly worthwhile, though the op-ed itself was rightwing talking points.

Avedon wrote:
I don’t understand this column. On most issues, this judge has proven to be remarkably conservative - not surprising since she was placed on the court by a conservative president.

Your definitiion of “liberal” seems to be “not vociferously opposed to Roe v. Wade.” But that’s not a liberal position, it’s mainstream - most Americans do not oppose Roe v. Wade.

Why is overturning Roe of such import to you, and why do you think it is the defining issue for not being a raving crazy loony lefty?
5/30/2009 8:12:36 AM

As Digby pointed out yesterday, Broder represents the Villager hopes that Roe v. Wade will be overthrown. Having women and their medical options restricted by laws espoused by rightwing thought, rather than science, is promoted by the fading Villagers.

As Avedon points out, most of this country disagrees with that viewpoint. Still, the media continues to give the major voice to that minority view. The impetus of creating controversy, by disagreement with rational though,t has overwhelmed the media, mostly it seems because they produce high numbers of responses by rejecting true and rational thought.

Facts have that liberal bias that Colbert realized years ago. Rational thinkers get enraged and make the furor that the Villagers want, because we can’t stand it that print and broadcast gets it wrong.

I think it’s time to remove the rational community’s support. We’re promoting irrational viewpoints. As no matter how often we point out that they are wrong and ignorant, that only convinces them further of the drawing power of rightwing views. I believe it is time to reject the Villagers outright.

I’ve stopped reading WaPo editorials, and commenting in response to Fred Hiatt’s editorialisms, even though reading the comments often is quite enlightening. It’s my choice to remove the impetus of enlarged audience.

We as liberals know better than to believe, and want to enlighten the weak-minded. It’s that impulse the Village idiots are using to convince advertisers that they are selling papers. It’s our best qualities that are being used against us.

If it promotes support for idiocy, I’m not going there. Support for denying women medically sound advice and procedures is wrong. WaPo by publishing the Villagers encourages that. It makes profits for them. Personally, I am removing myself from that equation.

No more reading the Villagers.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

The defenders of torture are getting pretty brazen, emboldened by Dick Cheney’s refusal to apologize for breaking the law.  It’s reached the point where Joe Scarborough thinks that it’s a positive thing to notice a similarity between Dick Cheney’s decision to place himself above the law and Jack Nicholson’s iconic Marine commander in the movie A Few Good Men.

I noticed the similarity between Nicholson’s character and George W. Bush more than three years ago, when news of the illegal warrantless surveillance was breaking.  The common thread linking Bush, Cheney, and the Nicholson character is that each claims the right to break the law, at their discretion, when they feel it is necessary to do so in order to protect Americans.  As I noted in early 2006, and have noted more recently in response to Cheney’s defense of torture, this is not democracy, it is an authoritarian, autocratic approach.  It is an embrace of Nixon’s view that “when the president (or vice president” does something, it is not illegal.”

As citizens of a constitutional democracy, I would think we would find the idea that one person can decide to set aside the law at his whim to be absolutely repellent.  Joe Scarborough seems to think it is something to celebrate about Dick Cheney’s “you can’t handle the truth” approach.  Are we democratic citizens who deserve leaders bound by the rule of law, or are we mere children, not to be trusted with important truths?  Amazingly, there seems to be some debate about this.