May 03, 2006
The "Inside Baseball" Elites
It’s time to shut down the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Posted May 3, 2006
By Rem Rieder
Rem Rieder ([email protected]) is AJR's editor and senior vice president.
Steve Scully of C-SPAN, the incoming president of the White House Correspondents' Association, says he wants to make sure the group's annual dinner/celebrityfest doesn't become "too Hollywood.""We don't want it to become an Oscar night," he told Editor & Publisher.
Well, guess what, Steve. It's a little late. That train left the station a long, long time ago.
This dinner has been an embarrassment for years. It's well past time to shut it down. It's a vivid symbol, like we need another one, of what's so very wrong with elite Washington journalism.
Years ago, the dinner was a low-key event where Washington journalists entertained their sources. The game changed in 1987 when the late Michael Kelly, then with the Baltimore Sun, snagged Iran/contra It Girl Fawn Hall as one of the Sun's guests.
....
Then-New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Michael Oreskes eloquently made the case for abolishing this abomination in 1999 when he decided the Times wouldn't participate in the dinner that year."The purpose of honoring good journalism with awards and raising money for scholarships has become lost in the circus," Oreskes said. "The association each year is seen around the country as host to a Bacchanalia that confirms everyone's worst sense of Washington. We should not be a part of this."
That year's star attraction was the late John F. Kennedy Jr., who was there as a journalist (he was running George magazine at the time). His date? Larry Flynt.
That's all you need to know.
That same year I asked Kelly – an extremely distinguished journalist – what he thought of the event he had unwittingly transformed with his Fawn Hall maneuver.
The problem, he replied, wasn't so much the dinner as the culture it mirrored. It was, he said, an "accurate reflection of Washington journalism," which he described as "smug and arrogant and self-important."
The WMD fiasco should have been a jolt to that smugness. And scrapping the White House Correspondents' Association dinner would be a small but symbolically significant step forward for Washington journalism.
I think that was the point that Stephen Colbert so eloquently demonstrated.
Posted by Melanie at May 3, 2006 02:58 PM | TrackBackAnd of course, since Colbert did indeed expose this veneer of self-importance, the audience's uncomfortable silence (along with the subsequent refusal to give attention to the story) only becomes that much louder.
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