To the paper’s credit, the Washington Post’s ombudsman (and credit the paper for being one of a tiny handful that employ independent referees of newspaper work) has laid out internal details of the disastrous decision to sell high-priced seats to off-the-record salons for government officials, lobbyists and the paper’s editorial staff at the publisher’s mansion.

Bottom line: The news department is covered in muck and the marketing guy tabbed as the fall guy in initial Post accounts actually raised some of the ethical concerns that eventually queered the deal.

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How did this happen? Big daily newspapers are suffering. When the publisher came calling about a money-raising idea, the inclination was to find ways to interpret the idea positively rather than negatively.

(I should add: It would appear readers don’t much care about the event, it’s mostly a blog-Beltway-journalist story.)

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