Absolute best thing I've read about the WHCD (from The Atlantic)
Here's the money quote:
"The Correspondents’ Dinner, after all, has long been a matter of controversy, an event criticized by press critics both professional and amateur for its tendency to erode, in its flurry of glad-handing and elbow-rubbing, the lines separating journalists from the people they are meant to hold to account. What the critics are acknowledging implicitly is that journalism has expanded in another way since those first White House correspondents gathered in 1921: The press has become, also, the media. CNN anchors and New York Times reporters do their work within a vast system that mingles news and entertainment. They exist in a world in which many journalists, by default—many of the journalists, at least, who gather in the International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton every April—double as celebrities. It’s time to acknowledge that and proceed accordingly. Power and victimhood, jokes and seriousness, steak and fish: You can have it both ways, until you can’t."
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/04/what-happened-at-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner/559232/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Scarf n' barf.
Internet empress Arianna Huffington is in Amalfi, Italy, apparently, mixing it up with Newt and Callista Gingrich, mega-entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman and his wife Deborah, and Barbara Walters.
The powerful, the press, and the politicians...one big happy family.
