White House Correspondents Dinner Needs to Go Away
By It’s not like I think Tom Brokaw is all that great (starting with his pushing of the extremely annoying and completely ahistorical “greatest generation” construction), but he’s sure right about the stupidity of the White House Correspondents Dinner:
“Look I think George Clooney is a great guy, I’d like to meet Charlize Theron, but I don’t think the big press event in Washington should be that kind of glittering event, where the whole talk is about Cristal champagne, taking over the Italian embassy, who had the best party, who got to meet the most people. That’s another separation between what we’re supposed to be doing and what the people expect us to be doing, and I think that the Washington press corps has to look at that, and by the way I’m a charter member of the White House Correspondents Association, I was there early on and often enjoyed it, but it’s gone beyond what it needs to be.”
What I found particularly distressing this year was the coverage the dinner got in my Twitter feed. The whole night it was #nerdprom this and that. What that suggested to me was a lot of journalists and bloggers who wish they were there. But isn’t the Correspondents Dinner part of the problem? Doesn’t it just reinforce both the overblown ego of the White House press corps and so much of mainstream media while also destroying what’s left of the boundary between journalists and politicians?