If you own a television or read a newspaper, you may have heard by now that a pastor in Florida plans to burn copies of the Quran on Saturday. The only reason you know anything about this is because the national media have decided, for reasons that are entirely unclear, to give this guy a platform. As Michael Calderone noted at Yahoo!, this pastor appeared on the front page of over 50 different newspapers...on Wednesday.  As Calderone pointed out, he doesn't even have that many members of his church.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas put the blame where it mostly belongs--on the media:

I ask you: If a sad little man burns some Qurans in the woods, and the media aren't there to film it, is it news?

Now, predictably enough, we are in the next cycle of coverage, with TV shows booking their "Should We Even Be Covering This Story?" segments. I know this because we've been called to appear on such programs. The funny thing is when you tell a producer that your comment on this story is that it isn't worth talking about, the response is inevitably something along the lines of, "Well come on and say that!"

Furthering the story of "Washington Post executives--reeling...over a flier promoting a 'salon' for lobbyists to mingle with prominent newsmakers," Politico reporters Michael Calderone and Andy Barr (7/4/09) think the suits at the Post might reasonably ask "Why us?":

The fact is the Post's clumsy effort to make money on its brand name and market its access to the powerful was a belated effort to follow in the steps of at least two other prominent news organizations: The Wall Street Journal and the Economist magazine.

The Journal, for instance, is charging a $7,500 for its two-day CEO Council in November, an elite gathering that will include the paper's top editors and high-profile speakers like Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. And for a few thousand dollars, the Economist can open the door to intimate off-the-record meet-and-greets with world leaders.

These events illustrate how the basic transaction--charging big fees to special interests to arrange private, special-access encounters with powerful people--that caused the Post this week to be excoriated is a more endemic practice than many people in political and media circles realize. Some watchdogs hope this week's Post scandal will help put an end to a hard-to-defend practice by revenue-hungry news organizations.

The quote from one such watchdog, Pew Project director Tom Rosenstiel, makes it totally clear: "He said, news organizations are 'encouraging the notion in the reader's mind that [they're] part of some insider establishment that it considers more important than public knowledge'"--now where would we ever get that idea?