More on the media’s sale of ‘access’

Yesterday, I blogged a bit about this issue, starting with noting that the Atlantic Monthly was selling access, access, access, as Jack Shafer reminds us.

And, I noted that this drug is as addicting inside the Beltway to the editorial side of newsrooms as it is to the business/marketing wing. That’s why, at the Washington Post, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli apparently signed off at first. It was only after he realized that this drug “access” would only be dispensed by the business side that he got all huffy.

More on that?

“Access” if part of why reporters inside the Beltway are OK with all their “on background” comments from White House staff, Cabinet department staff, etc. It’s not just the government that wants to control “access,” it’s the MSM.

First, it gets to hang on to scraps of its self-appointed “priesthood” function that way. Second, competing “priests” try to keep opposing press “sects” away from the inner sanctums of their temples.

Within the temples, at the biggest papers, you have different “denominations” whose leaders may control “access” from one another, even.

All this leads back to Brauchli’s bitchfest.

I can think of multiple grounds for concern.

1. He didn’t want to be herding cats amongst his own reporters.
2. He was worried about leaks from the business side, exposing Post sources to other papers, even though a lot of them are common to the New York Times, other papers still flush enough to afford larger DC bureaus, the AP, etc.
3. He was worried that like, when Pompey invaded Jerusalem and pulled back the curtain on the Holy of Holies, we would find nothing inside.

Want more evidence of media as high priests? Gene Lyons has some smackdown.

Update:It looks like the dynamic duo, the Washington Post’s publisher and executive editor, respectively, are going to let Charles Pelton take most the heat on the Post’s ill-fated salons, while Post President Stephen Hills won’t even talk to his own reporters about it.