Birth of the Fifth Estate

The Washington Post publisher recently planned to sell seats - for as much as $250,000 each - at a private meeting between lobbyists and federal government officials with some of the paper’s journalists attending.

The thought of such an affair is abhorrent to principled journalists. It guts the concept of the “Fourth Estate,” which is the notion that because the press keeps an eye on government officials they will conduct themselves honorably.

That the Post would stoop to such depths says much about the reality of Big Publishers being in bed with Big Government which has for many decades already been in bed with Big Business. It magnifies the degree to which the news organizations have abandoned consumers, and explains why readers and viewers are jumping ship. We already could sense that Washington and Columbus press corps is a con job under direction of corporate money managers. Here’s Exhibit A.

Exposure of this fiasco was a media milestone, but it has gone virtually unreported. A search of the Advocate and Dispatch archives came up blank. Nor was much if anything made of it anywhere that I saw except Editor & Publisher reports. No big deal to the media.

Once it was so exposed the Post called it off and surprising to me were on-line commenters to follow-up reports (in E&P, I think). Many were media people concerned not by degree of self-serving arrogance in the Post affair, but with advice to the Post about damage control.

Perhaps the most important thing about this is that it was exposed not by the establishment press, but by Politico.com - by bloggers. The 7/2/09 report is at this link.

This apparently means that now we have a Fifth Estate - a machine to keep us aware of how worthless the Fourth Estate has become.