The Party’s Over
It’s time to shut down the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Posted May 3, 2006
By Rem Rieder
Rem Rieder is AJR's editor and senior vice president.
....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....
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The problem is that this black tie underscores the notion that journalists are part of a wealthy elite, completely out of touch with ordinary Americans – their audience. (That's ridiculous, of course, given the fact that far too many journalists at smaller papers work for hideously low salaries). And panting furiously after these name and semi-name guests is simply demeaning.
If that isn't enough, there's the scrambling to get into the exclusive Bloomberg after-party. Please....I asked (Michael Kelly) – an extremely distinguished journalist – what he thought of the event he had unwittingly transformed....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.
http://ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4110
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