The Decline of the Washington Post

Remember when the Washington Post was caught trying to sell its reporters' time and minds to corporations a few months ago?  Now comes this, according to the Huffington Post:

On Thursday, December 31, the last day of 2009, The Washington Post published an article, presented as a news story, which could be a signal of the death of the Post as an independent and objective news source. The piece, entitled "Support grows for tackling nation's debt," appeared to be one of those background news pieces common in newspapers like the Post. But the article was written not by the newspaper's reporters - and not by an objective wire service, like the Associated Press - but by a new organization called the Fiscal Times, whose founder and major backer, Peter G. Peterson, has a long term ideological commitment to convincing Americans that "support is growing for tackling the nation's debt."

These are indeed hard times for journalism, but the Washington Post is sealing its own fate as a fake news source if, as the press release for the Fiscal Times claims, this new "independent" digital news publication reporting on fiscal, budgetary, health-care and international economics issues has forged its first media partnership, a content sharing agreement with The Washington Post. This deal, the first evidence of which is Thursday's article, is the equivalent of the Post reviving its old relationship with United Press International to cover religion and politics - without informing their readership that since 2000 the once-proud UPI has been owned by News World Communications, a media company owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church! The only difference is that Peter G. Peterson is starting his own news service instead of buying an old one.