The Washington Post ombudsman today takes David Broder to task for accepting speaking fees from industry and "special interest groups." Ken Silverstein at Harper's, who first brought Broder's moonlighting to, uh, light, today comments on the amazing and pathetic amount of flat lying Broder did in the face of the revelations.
Also today, David Broder's new column is about . . .
(Now, wait for it.)
. . . the distrust Obama will engender in Americans for taking money from small internet donors.
Ohmygodthisisgoingtobesomuchfun!
The WaPo ombudsman, Deborah Howell, has a go at taking Broder to task in today's Post. She reports that Broder initially simply denied any funny business.
Broder said he adheres to "the newspaper's strict rules on outside activities" and "additional constraints of my own. I have never spoken to partisan gatherings in any role other than a journalist nor to an advocacy group that lobbies Congress or the federal government. Virtually all of the speeches I have made have been to college or civic audiences."
Yeah. Well, that's not 100% true. Which is to say it's a flagrant, ass-in-the-wind, high-wire act lie. (Broder was later very, very sorry: ""I am embarrassed by these mistakes and the embarrassment it has caused the paper," Broder said.")
Silverstein, today:
Broder first told Howell, "I have never spoken to partisan gatherings in any role other than [that of] a journalist nor to an advocacy group that lobbies Congress or the federal government." That turned out to be false, as Howell discovered, so Broder came back to say, "I am embarrassed by these mistakes and the embarrassment it has caused the paper."
Broder told Howell he attended an event at the American Council for Capital Formation, "but did not give a speech." So apparently someone at the ACCF made up this account of Broder’s speech to the group?
I reported that Broder gave a speech at a meeting of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors (which paid him, he now admits, $7,000), which was a PAC fundraiser. Howell writes: "Mary Beth Coya, the Realtors’ senior vice president for public and governmental affairs, said the event was not a fundraiser but was attended by elected officials ‘to promote our government affairs programs’." The event in fact was clearly promoted as a PAC fundraiser. And by the way, "government affairs program" is Washington-talk for lobbying.
Silverstein goes on to note, "More outrageous is that Broder specifically denied to Howell that I had sought comment from him (which I know only because Howell told me during a phone conversation), even though I contacted him several times, by phone and email, beginning forty-eight hours before posting the first story."
Now, given that the Washington Post has just been shown to be giving a megaphone to an old aristocratic serial lying comic buffoon who is stuffing his pockets with interest-group speaking fees and vacations, you would think the editors would have more sense than to make it worse by allowing said old aristocratic serial lying comic buffoon who is stuffing his pockets with interest-group speaking fees and vacations to publish, in their paper, on the same day, this:
[S]uspending the dollar chase for the duration of the campaign, as McCain but not Obama will do, would be a major step toward establishing the credibility of the election process.
By refusing to join McCain in these initiatives in order to protect his own interests, Obama raises an important question: Has he built sufficient trust so that his motives will be accepted by the voters who are only now starting to figure out what makes him tick?
David Broder wants to know if Americans will trust Obama's motives if Obama is taking money from "a rich vein of small contributors using the Internet."
No, I'm not kidding.
The Post actually let him publish that in their paper. Today. The same day their ombudsman wrote of Broder:
Silverstein said an Internet search showed that Broder made a number of speeches to business groups, including the Western Conference of Prepaid Medical Service Plans, a group of nonprofit health plans; the National Association of Manufacturers, which met at a Florida resort; a Northern Virginia Association of Realtors fundraiser; and the American Council for Capital Formation, a nonprofit group promoting smaller government and lower taxes. Broder said he attended an ACCF dinner but did not give a speech and that he spoke free to the NAM and the health-care group. Silverstein said Broder also spoke to the Gartner Healthcare Summit in 2007. He was advertised as a speaker on an Internet site, but Broder said he canceled the engagement.
In regard to Broder's denials, see Silverstein. In any case, the issue is rather larger than this or that speech. In Silverstein's original entry on this matter, the one that got the ombudsman to write her report, Silverstein wrote:
Do a Google search and you’ll see that Broder is represented by a number of speaker’s bureaus, including Grabow, which says it is "your David Broder booking agent for private corporate events."
Ooof.
Is the Post going to continue to let this aristocrat (who is very, very sorry) darken its pages? Or will the Post take this advice:
It’s clear that some journalists now are in a market category where the amount of money that they can make on extracurricular activities raises, in my mind, exactly, and, clearly, in the public’s mind, exactly the same kind of conflict-of-interest questions that we are constantly raising with people in public life. . . .
People think that we are part of the establishment and therefore part of the problem. I mean, what bothers me is the notion that journalists believe, or some journalists believe, that they can have their cake and eat it too, that you can have all of the special privileges, access and extraordinary freedom that you have because you are a journalist operating in a society which protects journalism to a greater degree than any other country in the world, and at the same time you can be a policy advocate. You can be a public performer on the lecture circuit or television. I think that’s greedy.
That would be David Broder, talking to Frontline in 1996 for a piece called Why America Hates the Press.
(dday at Hullabaloo has a post up on this as well.)
[Update 10:48 am EST 6/22/08 by LithiumCola] As an example of the sort of groups Broder "denies speaking to," see A Siegel's post on the National Association of Manufacturers and the ACCF:
While the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council for Capital Formation take their dog-and-pony show of supposedly independent but fully deceitful analysis about global warming legislation around the country, reviews of the work are coming in from across the country.
-- snip --
Siegel's post looks at take-downs of the NAM/ACCF global warming denials -- take-downs that were written by people who are, unsuprisingly, Not-David-Broder.