Sounds ethical

What are you to do if you're a struggling news paper. Revenues are down debt is up, you decided a long time ago to put your news on the web for free and now no one will ever accept paying for it, and Craigslist is sleeping in your house, driving in your car, eating your food, and screwing your wife. So if you're the Washington Post and you're seeing all these problems there's only one obvious solution: sell access to your journalists for anyone with a sack full of cash.

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

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

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

Not to say this isn't completely and totally unethical, I mean who wouldn't want to pay the WaPo $25,000 so you could be in the same room with their neoconservative editorial/columnist crew and a blunt object to beat them with? If there's one thing I've always said about the news it's that the regular citizen has too much attention paid to his or her best interests and opinions in the health care debate. Isn't it time the news elite in this country were forced to consider the concerns of lobbyists and insurance CEO's? What better forum than one that is ethically indistinguishable from prostitution? Strike that: forced prostitution. I'm sure the journalists are thrilled to be doing this.

So if you want access to some of the Post's top minds get your $25,000 out, $250,000 if you want to be a part of the whole series of "Salons." See if an extra couple grand can get those journalists to perform some "French-style" reporting on you, maybe even get two of them to perform a "journalism show" like you saw in the seedy, pasty fleshed ink pits of Bangkok. I'm sure the WaPo is up for it. They really need the money.