The White House Correspondents Dinner Is an Awful Clown Show of Bullshit. That’s Exactly Why We Should Never, Ever Kill It.
I’ve never been inside the White House Correspondents Dinner, but I have covered it, exactly once, as a media reporter. It was one of the longest and most illuminating weeks of my life.
The coverage involved:
- Reporting from the week prior in the run-up to the event.
- Reporting from parties the night before.
- Reporting from the cocktail hour outside of the Washington Hilton ballroom. That, up there, is a photo of me, right behind Trump, during that cocktail hour, making a face that says: Nate, I am not nearly drunk enough to deal with the complete comedy of horrors I am experiencing right now.
- Eating shitty D.C. pizza (redundant, I know) in a Washington Hilton hotel room upstairs with five other media reporters as we watched that year’s dinner on TV, as Seth Meyers got at it.
- Reporting from the MSNBC after-party, and reporting from outside the Bloomberg/Vanity Fair party.
- Reporting from the Sunday brunches the next day, during one of which I personally witnessed Eleanor Clift of The McLaughlin Group get an entire pad of warm butter spilled on her by a caterer, which remains to this day one of the funniest things I’ve ever watched happen in real time.
All of which is to say: It is a goddamn fiasco. It truly is an Oscars-sized affair, with Oscars-sized self-regard, with (hilariously) only SAG-sized awards. The awards given out aren’t even the most coveted award in journalism! That’s a Pulitzer (and those, if we’re feeling the funk, are a whole different designer bag of bullshit, too).
You can read the story I wrote with Kat Stoeffel (as edited by Elizabeth Spiers) here, but the basic thrust was:
- It was 2011, and on the day after that year’s White House Press Correspondents Dinner (spoiler alert), Obama got up in front of the country, and announced that we had killed Osama Bin Laden, one night after cracking jokes with (and about!) the gathered news media brass.
- Meanwhile, not a single reporter had the story.
- The closest anybody got to being in front of it was some random guy in Abbotobad making jokes on Twitter, and then, The Rock. Who had sources in the military.
[And by the way, when we’re talking about “breaking the story,” we’re not talking about a story announcing that there’s a raid being planned on the most wanted terrorist in the world — I can’t imagine most news organizations running that, for a variety of reasons—but rather, having an inside track, and as soon as they can, being able to deliver a coherent story to the public about what had just happened, and how it went down.]
And here’s the thing: Obama was taking meetings about the operation to kill Bin Laden during that year’s dinner.
Again: The main subject of the White House Press Corps’ coverage was getting up and meeting with advisors about it during the dinner. As the entire White House Press Corps was in the same room with him.
To which you can only say LMAO what an absolute fucking own! Obama trashed a bunch of media types and reporters to their faces, capped it off with a schmaltzy spiel about the value of a free press, and walked away to a standing ovation. He also got some great digs in on Trump, and Seth Meyers got digs in on all of them.
There’s a theory that Trump started his 2016 presidential run that night—yet another reason we should get rid of the dinner! some say. Reminder: He was already running for president in 2011, and he was going to keep trying until he won or died or convinced himself that the system was rigged against him. Don’t get me wrong, Seth Meyers’ routine was great, but it doesn’t deserve that much credit. Even more important to remember is how Trump even got to the point where he was taken seriously in the first place, which does involve the White House Press Corps, and those at the Correspondents Dinner, and did happen in April 2011, the week before that year’s White House Press Correspondents Dinner:
Barack Obama, the American President, had to get up in front of the nation as news networks broke in, and he had to show America that his birth certificate was real. The allegation that it wasn’t was a bullshit lie cooked up out of thin air by Donald Trump. Rather than contemptuously cover that story as the bullshit that it was, it was a story, and it was a story because the White House Press Corps dignified it, covered it, and made it one.
This is the same D.C. press corps that couldn’t even get Trump to show us his most recent tax returns. One of those is a story with obvious news value. The other is a conspiracy theory that’d be too dumb for Designated Survivor and too absurd for Veep. And we’ve seen one. Not the other.
And look: Working in media is an often thankless job! Very rarely in this line of business do you get to work on the kinds of stories universally fawned over by readers, who feel your work has improved their lives for the better. In fact, now more than ever, everyone in the world has a say on how much your work sucks, and will tell you!
[And to think: There used to just be Letters to the Editor, and psychos having to pay $0.33 to send you a death threat. Now they just get to do that shit on Twitter for free! @ you! :/]
Also, compared to many other white collar businesses with grueling hours, the pay sucks, and it’s filled with many passive-aggressive worms, many of whom begrudge colleagues’ success as a matter of policy, usually because they value poise and pedigree over hard work and ingenuity (and usually, think they possess all of the above more than you).
(You might, here, wonder: If it truly is such a snake-pit that is so damaging to your emotional, physical, and financial bottom line, why do it then? Well, for the same reasons I smoked six Parliament Lites every day, for 18 years: I loved it, and I wanted it, and I didn’t want to do anything about either of those two facts, until I did.)
So maybe the thinking goes: “Yes, sure, our job can be useful if not downright important, it also sucks, maybe we should cut ourselves some slack one week a year, and give ourselves a nice night.”
And this, I actually have no problem with!
One of the big arguments against the WHPCD goes something like: “Wow, it’s MUCH BAD LOOK VERY UGLY for reporters to be sitting with their sources and subjects on national television, drinking, rubbing elbows, laughing, wearing Rent-the-Runway, taking selfies with Young Sheldon (or whoever).”
But outside of those last two things, the only major differences between this and every other night in D.C. are the cameras, allowing us to watch this take place.
Reporters and their sources regularly drink together; they laugh together; sometimes, they even eat together. And if they’re good reporters, or even better, well-funded, they never ever let the source pick up the check. This is how reporting works!
And in fact, if you’re a halfway decent reporter, you’re gonna invite one of your sources to dinner, get them absolutely shitfaced, take the picture of them with Young Sheldon for them, and then, you’re gonna get a massive story they were never supposed to open their mouths about, and you’re gonna run it. :)
….Except: That’s not what happens at the Correspondents Dinner.
What happens is that we get to see the delicate dance of reporters trading niceties, the continuation of an ongoing exchange that results in access to mediocre scooplets, which is much of what political coverage has become: A series of small items that together ostensibly assemble a meaningful composite, but here in reality, usually only serve as a distraction that ostensibly justifies a given reporter’s job by their ability to nail a hot scoop (and not much more).
This is the so-called “horse race” journalism of political coverage in 2018, and most people don’t care about it, and even more, most people aren’t impacted by it. Yes, the fourth estate as we currently know it is important, but yes, the fourth estate as we currently know it also often sucks.
And it’s okay if we see this exchange between reporters and the sources they’re close with, as it’s happening, in public! Would you rather not know of this gross closeness and symbiotic, succubi, feeder-fish relationship? It’s truly akin to watching sausage get made: You’ll never enjoy it the same way again, but at least you know more about what you’re biting into. And they are, after all, reporters. They’re supposed to want things to be public. Why not enjoy the same transparency out of journalism institutions and the sketchy awkward processes that result in reporting on the subjects they’re built to shine light on?
[A perfect meta-example of this: Sean Hannity and Donald Trump share the same lawyer! For a news institution like Fox News purports themselves to be, that’d be like sharing a toothbrush with your own ass! And of course, it wasn’t one of the White House Press Corps journalists who broke that story — journalists who work in the same building where Hannity all but has a desk next to the Oval Office — but a judge, when she ordered part of an active investigation unsealed.]
That’s exactly why it’s so refreshing to see, after a dinner of these people patting themselves on their backs for doing the above, a night of entertainment, by way of public humiliation, at their expense.
In the best years of this thing happening, both these journalists and the President get absolutely eviscerated — the journalists hearing, better than anyone who isn’t a top-tier comic could articulate—just how much they suck, and the President, being told just how much they suck in ways the journalists are too deep into the nice relationship with the President and his people to do, the relationship that affords them those aforementioned shitty scoops, and the relationship that they deserve to be dragged for—and dragged hard.
In other words, this year’s Press Corps dinner was a resounding success, maybe one of the greatest (if not, perhaps, the greatest) in its history. As evidence? The incoming White House Press Corps president, Olivier Knox, wants to end the tradition of the comic coming through.
The great irony, of course, is that they’re considering doing this because a comedian did their job, told us how it is, and did it so well, we also got to watch as the White House Press Corps issued ham-fisted, backbent apologies for these jokes. And they were apologizing to people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, people who have expressed nothing but contempt for (and a desire to jail) a free press doing their jobs—exposing the truth.
And in their apology, a self-own of epic proportions, Michelle Wolf inadvertently blasted light on the deep existential integrity issues facing the White House Press Corps. How’s that for a good scoop?
And god, wouldn’t you hate to see that kind of thing go?
Long Live the Correspondents Dinner, in all of its gross resplendency, a sight to behold, and an American Treasure, the one night of the year America gets a transparent look at those who ostensibly serve to create transparency, and also, the reporters who want that selfie with Young Sheldon.
