(updated below)

The Washington Post's intrepid Mary Ann Akers, wife of Newsweek's Mike Isikoff, investigates and reports on the activities behind the scenes of the GOP presidential debate, including those engaged in by her and her husband's colleagues, among others (bold in original):

The real fun for debate host Chris Matthews -- it was his first ever presidential debate, by the way -- came afterward. He and his "Hardball" gang, including MSNBC Vice President Tammy Haddad and a few national political reporters, went to dinner at a restaurant called Tuscany in Westlake Village, Calif., where they bumped into the hunk of the '80s, actor Tom Selleck.

Selleck was on his way out, but he stopped and chatted with Matthews. After he left, Selleck called the restaurant and bought a nice bottle of Meritage for Matthews's table, which included Washington Post political correspondent Dan Balz, Politico columnist Roger Simon and Newsweek's Howard Fineman, among others.

The hunk of the debate, however, was James Denton, the actor who plays the sexy plumber/handyman on "Desperate Housewives." Denton was there as Haddad's guest. She invited him after hearing that he had told folks at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington a few weeks ago that "Hardball" was his favorite show.

And how did Politico, the start-up online news organization, score its coveted role in co-hosting the debate? Because Fred Ryan, the chief operating officer of Allbritton Communications Company, which owns Politico, also happens to be chairman of the board of the Reagan library.

Ryan told The Sleuth that Nancy Reagan wanted the library's first ever presidential debate to be a "citizen participation type" of production, in which citizens could ask questions online. And that's how the debate worked last night. "There were literally hundreds of thousands of people casting votes online," Ryan said.

After choosing his conglomerate's newest media gem to play host, Ryan went to Haddad to get Hardball's Matthews on board. He said the library wanted someone "they knew and trusted" and Matthews had "always been a reliable partner."

She doesn't mention that Fred Ryan, in addition to being the COO of Allbritton and who -- in Akers' words -- "also happens to be chairman of the board of the Reagan library" (hey, what an unnoteworthy coincidence), "also happens to be" The Politico's CEO and a former official in the Reagan White House. But that doesn't matter. Fred Ryan is a great guy and there is no reason to cast nasty aspersions on his credibility in running an objective news organization by talking about any of that.

I think it's great that Howie Fineman and Dan Balz and Chris Matthews -- who was personally selected to host the debate by Fred Ryan in apparent consultation with Nancy Reagan, because Matthews is such a "reliable partner" -- got to spend such quality time with both Tom Selleck and James Denton. As Akers mentions, both of them are real "hunks" and that quality, more than any other, is what both Matthews and Fineman value most in a political candidate. These are the people who constantly go on television and tell us all what "ordinary Americans" want and think and believe.

I also think it's excellent that Akers -- who calls herself "The Sleuth" at the top of her column -- dug all of this up and then used her space in The Washington Post to report it. All of the names of the stars are bolded just like Page Six does it. And it's particularly enjoyable how she skimmed right over the story of why a Reagan official is in charge of The Politico and what that means, and instead focused like a laser beam on the type of wine Selleck sent to the table ("a nice bottle of Meritage for Matthews's table").

Finally, please keep in mind that if you are a critic of the media and believe our political press is dysfunctional and broken to its core, that is only because you are a partisan and don't understand the important and elevated role journalists play. There is no other reason why you would be so critical of our national press other than the fact that you are angry because they're not more partisan.

UPDATE: Let's have the first comment to this post be from David Halberstam from back in November, 1999 -- even before the media's full-on collapse under the Bush presidency:

I thought that with the end of the century approaching, it might be a good time to take stock of where this profession is. Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a time of a genuine flowering of a journalistic culture . . .

But the reverse is true. . . . What I think is happening is something extremely serious, nothing less than a change in the value system in a very important part of the news business.

At the core of the old value system was a belief on the part of the men and women who worked in journalism that this was an uncommonly privileged life, that we did not do this for the money -- almost all of us could have made a great deal more money in some other field, but we were uncommonly privileged, free men and free women working for a free press in a free society, beneficiaries of exalted constitutional freedoms, willing, if need be on occasion, to report to the nation things which it did not necessarily want to hear.

We have morphed in the larger culture from a somewhat Calvinist society to an entertainment society, and that is reflected in the new norms of television journalism -- where the greatest sin is not to be wrong but to be boring. Because boring means low ratings. And so altogether too many people at the top in the television newsrooms have accepted the new, frillier dictates of the men and women above them in the corporations. . . .

Magazines which were essentially tabloid were inexpensive to produce, more so than sitcoms, seemed to have acceptable ratings, and so they proliferated under the guise of being news. And a great many of our colleagues went along with it -- for immense salaries and a great deal of air time, of course. . . .

Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks.

Television's gatekeepers, at a time when a fragmenting audience threatens the singular profits of the past, stopped being gatekeepers and began to look the other way on moral and ethical and journalistic issues. Less and less did they accept the old-fashioned charge for what they owed the country.

The viewpoint seemed to be -- from their testing and polling -- that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that our new objective, widely celebrated news organization is owned and operated by hard-core right-wing ideologues. But it's all related -- modern "journalists," as Halberstam says, take dictates from those for whom they work and "go along with it -- for immense salaries and a great deal of air time" -- not to mention fun nights out with real television hunks and being personally selected by Nancy Reagan's political operative to be the star of the television debate. That is what has led, as Halberstam put it, to "an abdication of responsibility within the profession."

UPDATE II: Just to be clear, the focal point here is not that Akers has done something wrong by passing along petty gossip. She is doing that, of course, but at least she is candid about the fact that this is the purpose of her column (as opposed to many of her colleagues whose purpose is identical but maintain the pretense of serious journalism).

Leaving aside her complete lack of interest in the Politico-Reagan connection, I think that Akers' "reporting" here is valuable precisely because it provides a glimpse into the underbelly of the Beltway Versaille culture.