Talking Points and the Major Media

Secret dinners with White House high level people? Media elites? Who would have guessed? Well, we would and did. See all posts in this long running series here.

Let's see, in "regular attendance" at these dinners are the New York Times (David Brooks and Maureen Dowd), The Washington Post (Gene Robinson and Ruth Marcus), NBC News (David Gregory), ABC news (George Stephanopoulos), PBS (Gwen Ifill), the New Yorker (Jane Mayer), Vanity Fair (Todd Purdum), Time (Walter Isaacson), the Atlantic and National Journal (Ron Brownstein, Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch).

The Washington Times? Fox News? The Wall Street Journal? Those invitations must have gotten lost in the mail. But not even George Will, an ABC insider, has been invited? Hrmmmm.

It's worth comparing these dinners with the breakfasts described in the article that were conducted by Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor for some 35 years. Mr. Sperling opened the breakfasts to all journalists and the proceedings were public and on-the-record. We are told that David Bradley, the owner of the Atlantic who runs these elite dinners, was "intrigued" by the Sperling breakfasts. I think that is "intrigued" in the sense that a felon is intrigued with the inner workings of the corner liquor store. It is not because he wants to run a store just like it.

Methinks our political tributaries runneth over.