Thursday, December 07, 2006
In the drink
Yet another journalistic lobbying arm of the Axis of Dunces has been set up as a newspaper called The Capitol Leader and John Harris and the Pool Boy are jumping in the pool:
Ah, the cesspool. That would, of course, be Congress. Aka Capitol Hill.
We caught a whiff of the cesspool the other day when a group of corporate liberals announced that they were going to launch yet another "newspaper" to cover the cesspool.
Millionaire media mogul Robert Allbritton and journalist Martin Tolchin have teamed up to launch something they will call The Capitol Leader.
The Capitol Leader will begin publishing on November 21 and will join an already crowded field consisting of Roll Call, The Hill, the National Journal and Congressional Quarterly.
Allbritton succeeded his father, Joe L. Allbritton, as chief executive at the Washington, D.C.-based Riggs Bank. Riggs, you may recall, was sold in 2004 after it pled guilty to criminal charges related to illegally operating bank accounts for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and routinely ignoring evidence of corrupt practices in managing more than 60 accounts for the government of Equatorial Guinea.
Junior is now runs Allbritton Communications Co. -- which owns two local DC television stations -- and is set to be publisher of the Capitol Leader. Tolchin is a former New York Times correspondent who co-founded the Hill in 1994.
"There is so much going on up there that there's definitely room for another publication, and probably many more publications," Tolchin told the Washington Post. "I don't think we'll be the last." Indeed, it won't.
Via Avedon, Jay Rosen, and Atrios.
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