Put another way, the company that owns The Washington Post is almost entirely at the mercy of the Federal Government and the Obama administration -- the entities which its newspaper ostensibly checks and holds accountable. "By the end of 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government." The Post Co.'s reliance on the Federal Government extends beyond the source of its revenue; because the industry is so heavily regulated, any animosity from the Government could single-handedly doom the Post Co.'s business... --
Glenn Greenwald examines WaPo's entanglement with for-profit education
posted by hippybear
on Apr 12, 2011 -
27 comments
January 1,
1985: Earfuls of earrings out, armful of bangles in.
January 1,
1993: Pellegrino out, Crystal Pepsi in
January 1,
2004: Viagra out, Levitra in
(MetaFilter previously in)
January 1,
2011: Trolling out, Hacktivism in.
The List: a middlebrow, Beltway elite, mildly insufferable, perennially baffling Washington Post tradition since
1978 (Concave chests out, bosoms in)
posted by silby
on Jan 1, 2011 -
52 comments
... the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. (previously)
posted by Joe Beese
on Dec 20, 2010 -
79 comments
Top Secret America: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
[more inside]
posted by ryoshu
on Jul 19, 2010 -
113 comments
In a new essay entitled
Build the Wall, David Simon (who was a
Baltimore Sun reporter before he produced
The Wire) argues that if the larger newspaper industry is to survive, The New York Times and Washington Post must start charging readers for access to their websites (preferably done as a single action in concert with each other) —
John Gruber,
Dave Winer, and the folks at Gawker
disagree, and Steven Berlin Johnson argues that while the future for newspapers might be quite bleak,
the future for journalism and high quality analysis is actually quite bright. Meanwhile, the Times
is currently doing market research to see if it's readers would be willing to pay $5 a month for online access, and the Associated Press
announced it's intent to build a new news DRM system that will enable users to “
consume, mash up and share AP content based on rights”.
posted by dyslexictraveler
on Jul 24, 2009 -
128 comments
Demon Denim. Feeding off a earlier
column in the WSJ by Daniel Akst, who wrote, "no fabric has ever been so insidiously effective at undermining national discipline," conservative columnist George Will takes up the (denim-free) banner in the crusade to rid America of "the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche."
posted by Liver
on Apr 16, 2009 -
158 comments
Fatal Distraction. The lead story in this Sunday's Washington Post Magazine. "Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime?". By Gene Weingarten.
[more inside]
posted by Ike_Arumba
on Mar 7, 2009 -
296 comments
"Yes, We Tortured," says
Susan Crawford, Convening Authority of The Guantanamo Military Commission. "I sympathize with the intelligence gatherers in those days after 9/11, not knowing what was coming next and trying to gain information to keep us safe," said Crawford, a lifelong Republican. "But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward."
posted by Xurando
on Jan 14, 2009 -
131 comments
Mind Games. "She speaks about her situation calmly, occasionally laughing at her own predicament and her struggle with what she originally thought was mental illness....Like Girard, Naylor describes what she calls "street theater" -- incidents that might be dismissed by others as coincidental, but which Naylor believes were set up. She noticed suspicious cars driving by her isolated vacation home. On an airplane, fellow passengers mimicked her every movement -- like mimes on a street."
Link goes to a Washington Post story - reg. may be required.
posted by Sticherbeast
on Feb 5, 2007 -
63 comments
The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
posted by Postroad
on Dec 31, 2005 -
33 comments
Newsfilter: Washington Post columnist/blogger Dan Froomkin writes the "
White House Briefing," an online "daily anthology of works by other journalists and bloggers," which is often critical of the administration. This past Sunday, the new
Post ombudsman wrote that the paper's White House correspondents worried that Froomkin's column creates an appearance of bias at the Post.
Froomkin responsed, and hundreds of commentors offered their support. Then Post national politics editor
John Harris weighed in, to somewhat less acclaim from commentors. Harris expanded on his views in
this interview. The whole affair raises issues about allegations of a
subservient, stenographic press, how the media
deals with charges of liberal bias, the
perceived vindictiveness of the Bush administration, and the relationship between
in-house bloggers and the traditional media.
posted by ibmcginty
on Dec 14, 2005 -
20 comments
A Peek Under the PR Mask Once in a blue moon, we actually get a peek under the White House's public-relations mask, and this morning it comes courtesy of Peter Baker and Dan Balz , whose front-pager in The Washington Post suggests that Bush's unflagging public confidence about his Iraq policy reflects the work of public opinion researchers.
posted by Postroad
on Dec 5, 2005 -
25 comments
Louisiana Leads in Army Corps Spending, but Millions Had Nothing to Do With Floods In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.
[H]undreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood
on Sep 8, 2005 -
71 comments
Administration Paid Commentator (WashPost membership rqd) The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to help promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law on the air, an arrangement that Williams acknowledged yesterday involved "bad judgment" on his part.
I'm sure y'all check the Washington Post regularly, but isn't this simply bribing a journalist?
posted by punkbitch
on Jan 8, 2005 -
44 comments
Community Values, Corporate Profit and Pornography "Popular culture isn't popular because members of the "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show" (to borrow a line from a campaign ad this year) are the only customers. It's because there is an unquenched thirst for it, and the corporate profiteers (who are members of and contributors to both political parties) see a nationwide market for it." What will we tell the children?
posted by nofundy
on Dec 21, 2004 -
20 comments
The Washington Post decided to publish this advertising insert. Basically, it is political propoganda aimed at blacks speaking against gay rights. The problem is that it is filled with so much questionable information, and is so obviously intended to inflame one minority group towards another, that I seriously question The Washington Post's judgment in publishing it. It tries to destroy comparisons with the black civil rights movement by claiming homosexuality can't be genetic since they don't reproduce and conveniently ignores events like
the Stonewall riots. Will we see advertising supplements from holocaust deniers next?
posted by McBain
on Nov 21, 2004 -
164 comments
