Photo by Steve Wampler

Photo by Steve Wampler

Hey, remember when the Washington Post had that brilliant idea to host a “salon” at the boss’s house where lobbyists could pay to mingle with government officials and WaPo news staff?  Ever wonder what happened to the guy who took the fall for it?  Well, TPM found him:

Still, it doesn’t look like Pelton has any regrets. Today, he’s out with a post at Paid Content headlined “How To Turn Journalists Into Profit Centers.” And here’s one of several of Pelton’s suggestions for how to do this:

If a media organization has a reporter covering the healthcare-reform debate, it should host a sponsored health-care seminar, and that reporter should suggest the speakers, program the event, and lead that seminar.

In other words, pretty much exactly what got Pelton and the Post into hot water this summer.

Awesome!  This is pretty much the theme of Pelton’s entire post: Journalists should start peddling their services as hosts and event planners to hustle up extra cash for their employers.  I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Many organizations still believe that merely assisting in such a program would compromise reporters and editors’ professional ethics.

That’s balderdash. What counts is honest disclosure about such relationships, and holding reporters and editors accountable – just like sources are held accountable – for what they produce. In my view it is silly to anguish over the nuances of attribution rules, i.e., whether material discussed at a seminar by source-participants should be on- or off-the-record, or not-for-attribution. (This was an issue that arose with respect to The Washington Post’s canceled “salon” dinners this past year, while I was briefly at the paper as the General Manager of Conferences and Events.) Journalists spend countless hours in background conversations with sources. If they need or want to drag a source onto the record, they should not hesitate to do so….

Ah yes, of course.  The problem with the WaPo salon idea was potential quibbles over disclosure and attribution, not the fact that corporate lobbyists would be paying the newspaper large sums of cash for access to reporters and members of congress.

This “journalists must monetize themselves” idea disturbs me on multiple levels.  The most obvious is that that instead of generating revenue by charging for access to content (subscriptions) or access to customers (advertising), Pelton is actually encouraging media enterprises to make money by charging for access to the people who create their content.  Unless the dollars are insignificant (in which case why bother?), the potential for conflict of interest seems pretty high.  Pelton’s solution is for reporters to simply… not be influenced by their benefactors.

That seems easier said than done.  But even if a reporter does manage to maintain perfect objectivity, how many readers are going to trust a health care story by someone who discloses that they just hosted an Aetna-sponsored health care seminar?  Or worse yet, doesn’t disclose it?

A further concern is how this would skew the way media organizations evaluate their news staff.  Instead of being graded on the quality of their analysis, the clarity of their writing, or their ability to sniff out a scoop, reporters would instead be graded on how much money they brought in last quarter.  A sloppy hack who excels at schmoozing becomes a star, while a diligent bloodhound gets pushed out, or feels pressured to modify his or her reporting to curry favor with sponsors.  (I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t happening already.)

And then there’s the question of how much time and focus journalists will have on their reporting if they’re constantly scrambling to host and organize events.  It’s hard to believe that that wouldn’t take a toll on the depth, quality, and quantity of reporting – perhaps open the door even further for newspapers to accept content from the likes of Fiscal Times.

Ah, who am I kidding.  I already think most news media are in thrall to their corporate parents, so why am I worrying about whether my shit sandwich is on the wrong kind of bread?