Dinosaurs Going Down for the Count

The wonderful Jack Shafer of Slate.com, has a hilariously insightful article, “The David Bradley Effect,” about the ongoing DC Beltway controversy surrounding the outed pecuniary perfidy of Washington media royalty, baron David Bradley of The Atlantic, and baroness Katherine Weymouth of The Washington Post.

The Post has long been the mouthpiece of the Establishment in the nation’s capital. The present publisher of The Post, Ms. Weymouth, is granddaughter of Katherine Graham (known as Katherine the Great), and great-granddaughter of Eugene Meyer, chairman of the Fed, owner/publisher of The Post, and first head of the World Bank.

(Meyer was succeeded in this last post by John J. McCloy, later chairman of the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Ford Foundation, and key member of the Warren Commission (hint, hint!). He was widely regarded by wags in the know as “the Chairman of the Establishment.”)

Ms. Weymouth and The Post, it seems, have been caught with their knickers down. The Post was on the verge of putting on a series of private, for profit, off-the-record meetings where top Obama administration officials, congressional leaders, major journalists, and top drawer corporate bigwigs could secretly meet, discuss, and hash out public policy.

You know, privatelike Jekyll Island-private, like Council on Foreign Relations-private; private like the famed Georgetown soirees grandmother Kay used to put on for the Beltway elites in journalism, intelligence circles, and the upper ranks of the Washington Nomenclatura, delightfully described in Hugh Wilford’s terrific book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America.

The term “the mighty Wurlitzer,” coined by high level CIA official Frank Wisner, was used to describe the elaborate covert networks of propaganda, deception, and media manipulation sponsored by the Agency. A key player in this campaign of Cold War subterfuge and deceit was “the Golden Boy”—Washington Post publisher Phil Graham (the husband of Katherine—and Eugene Meyer’s son-in-law), who later committed suicide (although some informed observers, such as the distinguished award-winning journalist and historian Sterling Seagrave, believe otherwise).

What has outraged many denizens of the incestuous Beltway is not that these meetings were to be clandestine or closed to the unwashed masses, but that they were to be manipulated to further the sagging, diminishing revenues of the dinosaurs at The Post and The Atlantic.

After all, this covert conspiratorial relationship has always been the super-glue binding the State to its mouthpieces in the mainstream media.

It’s as old as Hamilton and Jefferson and their notorious newspaper wars in the early years of the Republic. Remember Sally Hemings?

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6:51 pm on July 17, 2009