What Katharine Weymouth Doesn't Know about Jurassic Journalism

The controversy at the Washington Post over pay-to-play schmooze-fests between lobbyists and government officials and newsroom staff, all to be "facilitated" by publisher Katharine Weymouth at her home, is making me feel old. Like dinosaur old. (Though hopefully with a brain larger than a walnut.)

Thing is, I'm not really that old – though a career in journalism ought to be measured in dog's years, with one year counting for seven in most any other profession.

When I started out in radio in the late 1980s (that's not so long ago, really-is it?) we wrote on typewriters and brandished Wite-Out, and I used a "word processor" for the first time at my second newspaper. When on the road, we printed out copy and faxed it to the newsroom to be typed into the system, or dictated our pieces live (and out of breath) to a rewrite man after running to find a working pay phone, a lá Clark Kent looking for a changing room. Never mind trying to get in touch from some overseas posting.

Oh, and we wouldn't take even a cup of coffee from a source for fear of crossing an ethical boundary.

But one generation passeth away, another cometh, and things can look very different in a very short time. Looking back, it seems the "wall" between the news side and the business side started falling around the time the Berlin Wall did, as the industry started to contract – when the next empire falls, will anybody be there to cover it? – and bottom-line capitalism won out over all. The gaudy profit margins of the 1990s seemed to blind news executives to the coming digital revolution, and ghastly leveraged takeovers left media outlets shouldering huge debts just as those profit margins began shriveling to the width of Ann Coulter's middle finger.

At the same time, grad schools began training journalists who then had to go to a newsroom to learn the skills they would actually need to practice their craft – and to learn that journalism is a blue-collar trade as much as it is a white-collar profession.

Too many corporate types don't understand that, or realize that all that stands between us and ethical problems are our scruples. (And as cheeky little Tatum O'Neal said to Ryan O'Neal in "Paper Moon," way back in 1973, in answer to his declaration that he has scruples, dammit: "If you got them, I sure bet they belong to somebody else!") In fact, we did get them from somebody else – from those who trained us in the biz, raised us to know where the line was, and would drum us out before we could get fired if we transgressed.

With fewer journos finishing their careers in newsrooms, fewer journos in newsrooms at all, and more of us sitting in the splendid isolation of home offices, the transmission of wisdom – at least as important as knowledge – is interrupted. And so things happen.

As my colleague Melinda Henneberger has been doggedly reporting, the ethical reflexes trained by years of conditioning don't seem to have been developed in Weymouth and the WaPo superstructure. But we live in hope, and there's nothing like a near-death experience to spark a conversion.

What killed the dinosaurs? Science shows there have been several mass extinctions throughout the history of the planet, usually caused not by a satisfyingly catalcysmic event like a meteor but by long terms changes that kill you before you realize it – like the proverbial frog put in cold water who is then slowly cooked by gradually raising the temperature to boiling. (Or golden frogs, as the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert recently showed.)

The good news is that biologists have shown that frogs will in fact jump out of the pot if they can - and will flourish if they find a hospitable environment elsewhere.

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