OPINION:
At one time, the president of the United States attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which was thrown by the press corps and attended by politicians and celebrities. Afterward, he said it was “probably the worst of this type that I have attended,” adding that the attendees were “a drunken group; crude and terribly cruel.”
No, it wasn’t President Trump. It was President Nixon back in 1971.
In the subsequent 50 years, the dinner has only gotten worse. Now, it’s just a joke — a drunken, crude and terribly cruel joke.
Once a star-studded event where power, press and Hollywood collided in a symphony of awkward jokes and questionable ethical boundaries, it is now literally nothing: no president, no comedian, no celebrities. Instead, this year’s lavish affair — with 2,000 people crammed into the massive ballroom at the Washington Hilton — was simply the press praising itself.
“As I promised, it’s just us,” said Eugene Daniels, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. That was, of course, not by choice. As Mr. Trump did during the first four years he was president, he chose not to attend, and Mr. Daniels had to fire the hired comedian after she called his administration “a bunch of murderers.”
Mr. Daniels reminded everyone that the president’s absence wasn’t because of a lack of invitation. “We don’t invite presidents to placate them,” he said in a self-centered rant that essentially ended with him saying, “We invite them to remind them they should love us!”
To soothe the gaping hole left by Mr. Trump’s absence, the WHCA president played a montage of former presidents doing their best stand-up routines at past dinners, like watching old home videos from better times. The night culminated with the association handing out awards to (you guessed it) exclusively liberal news outlets.
The WHCA dinner was once a staid affair, with old-school reporters hobnobbing with political insiders. The evening has since morphed into a weeklong series of garden parties and drunken bashes that eventually even drew sponsors (the Grey Goose vodka party was a particularly debauched affair). The dinner grew to feature a red carpet packed with paparazzi (never forget that WE are the real stars).
That was before Mr. Trump came along. He exposed the legacy media for what they truly were: stacked with bleeding-heart liberals and heavily biased against conservatives. Plus, the old guard media are giving way to YouTubers, podcasters, Substack newsletter writers and blatantly partisan “content creators.” The legacy media don’t know it yet, but they are dead.
The “nerd prom,” as the annual dinner is known inside the Beltway, has just become gross. This year, the rabidly left HuffPost announced the night before the dinner that it would bring federal workers fired by the Trump administration to illustrate what it called a “sustained government assault on the federal workforce and the press.” Ugh.
However, the Saturday night dinner included one extraordinary event illustrating how sad the media had become. Alex Thompson, a reporter for Axios, won an award for coverage of President Biden. In his acceptance speech, he took the room to task for its pathetic coverage of a president who was clearly losing his mental acuity.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Mr. Thompson said. “But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of that. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should have done better.”
Well, duh. The fact that one reporter needed to tell this to a roomful of reporters shows how far from reality today’s media really are. And throwing a big party every year to celebrate itself is the last thing the press corps should be doing these days.
When I was a White House correspondent, I once got to chatting with Bill Plante, the legendary CBS News reporter. I asked him what he thought of the evening, and I’ll never forget what he said: “They should’ve put this thing to death decades ago.” He was right then, and he’s even more spot-on today.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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