New York Times reporter-cotton candy maker Sheryl Stolberg defended her Sunday puff piece on Washington Post publisher Katherine Weymouth, who with her rock-hard body and newspaper "royalty" family have run the Post into a situation so desperate they had to be saved by Jeff Bezos.
Stolberg complained to Politico that the Graham family "kept their secret from an entire newsroom of their own journalists [and] they kept it from me." Weymouth, who's slated to remain in her "royal" position, explained to Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post that she had no obligation to tell a competitor her innermost business secrets while the competitor puffed her up like Diane Lane playing Hillary:
I obviously didn't plan that timing. The Times contacted us and Sheryl said we're going to do this profile with or without you. So you can cooperate or not. And she had a good reputation, so we cooperated and obviously we didn't know if this transaction was going to happen or when it was going to happen or when her story was going to run.So the fact is, she made -- I know she's getting criticized, I think a little unfairly -- she made clear to me from the beginning that this was going to be a personal profile that would run in Style and it was not a business story. So I never had to lie to her. We didn't discuss whether the Post would, you know, my children would take it over or whatever. It was a personal profile and it that is what it was.
It's not like we were going to leak it to the New York Times...Let's be serious here. If anybody was going to have this story, it was going to be us.
