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Not A Bash But A Bit: White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Several years ago, as a neophyte reporter for OfftheBus at The Huffington Post, I shared a table with an NPR reporter and her husband at the Obama Campaign Victory Party after the California primary. One of the Orwellian quirks of American campaign politics (and there are many) is that election-night gatherings are called “victory parties” even when the candidate loses—as indeed Obama did that night, to Hillary Clinton, by almost ten points.
Rising to get another diet coke, I asked the couple could I bring them anything. The woman declined, saying that the NPR code of ethics prohibited reporters from accepting even a glass of water at a political event. The war between displeasure and forbearance on her husband’s face spoke volumes about their marriage and hinted at what would become for me a fascinating conundrum: the relationship between politicians and the press who chronicle them. At the time, I merely shrugged and fetched myself a second drink.
What I didn’t know then in January 2008 but subsequently learned the hard way—publicly—is that central to the act of journalism is the question of allegiance. Seldom, however, is daily news framed within the larger universe of moral choice-and-consequence. The increasingly competitive and therefore fevered, 24/7-communication-driven landscape has honed reportorial perspective down to a sharp verbal point, tensile, yet weak because in the quick-churn news cycle the lines between skepticism and cynicism on the one hand and partisan bias on the other get muddied and muddled.
Citizen consumers of news should be forgiven, therefore, a current widely-held misperception that most political writers are scabrous and weaseling, that they are merely inside-the-Beltway tools, that they are not worthy of trust. But in fact serious journalists—who in my observation include many if not all American reporters—weigh difficult, nuanced choices about what they say and how they say it, every single day. As I’ve observed before, the making of a reporter is what he or she leaves out—not what gets put in.
Part of the reportorial consciousness is the awareness—one that came upon me gradually, although of course I can’t speak for others—of the reach and grasp of the tentacles of power. Close proximity to politicians always carries the danger of corruption—in short, of co-option. Influence can be slow and insidious—but suddenly visible to all, or perhaps more horribly, only and ever to oneself.
This is why media organizations like NPR have proscriptions against accepting even a glass of water. (The more recent example would be the ban against attending the Glenn Beck/Jon Stewart rallies in DC.) In a way, such rules are like magic charms, in that they reveal the fear of “acts of congress” more than they prevent. After all, would taking a bottle of Evian from the drinks table in a mostly-empty ballroom have influenced NPR coverage of Obama?
In the NPR reporter’s husband’s mind, the rule was ridiculous. I would agree with him—except for one thing. The reverse of co-option is betrayal. Fortunate journalists—fortunate, or chastened, or both—carry with them always a kernel of hard truth: that however much one may grow either to like or to depend upon for material a politician and his/her operatives—a natural consequence of spending so much time together—the pursuit of the story, the quest for the heart of the matter, comes first. Inherent is the possibility for betrayal of a relationship that has grown, and grown naturally, because we are all human.
I have written about betrayal before. Today it’s opposite is on my mind because last Saturday (post-Osama, a seeming eternity ago) I watched back-to-back two very different spectacles: the documentary Bill Cunningham New York and the video from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner highlighting the remarks of President Obama and Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers.
First a little background. Bill Cunningham is the octogenarian photographer for the New York Times whose work is featured in “On the Street,” his weekly snapshot of current sidewalk fashion, and “Evening Hours,” a very different chronicle, the remnant of what remains of society event coverage in the Times. One of the many pleasures of the documentary is the gradual unfolding of Bill Cunningham’s personality and character. He is that New York rara avis: a kind man.
Later Saturday evening, at my computer and watching clips from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I thought about Bill Cunningham because the dinner speeches seemed unusually mean-spirited this year. Now, of course, we know why President Obama, who had within the last 24 hours given the secret order for the Navy Seals team to fly into Pakistan without Pakistani cooperation to take out Osama Bin Laden, spoke to presidential aspirant Donald Trump, a guest at the Washington Post table, with such withering disdain.
President Obama: “But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example—no seriously, just recently, in an episode of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’—at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. (Laughter.) And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. (Laughter and applause.) Well handled, sir. (Laughter.) Well handled.”
Following Obama, comedy-writer Seth Meyers upheld the dinner tradition of roasting the guests and aimed most of his barbs, as Obama had, at Trump. Whether Meyers went too far is a matter of opinion and taste. The real question: why was Trump, a subject of intense news coverage at the Post, at the same time a dinner guest of the Post?
Why in the world, for that matter, did NPR, given both its negative publicity of late and perennial charges of liberal bias, take a table at an event where the slings and arrows are zinged more at Republicans every year than at Democrats? Quite naturally, since the affair has become more Hollywood-slums-in-DC than Journalists-Stoop-Small-to-Talk-with-Actors. (Twisted, mutually reinforcing delusions, perhaps?)
How do outsiders like me know that NPR took one of the many tables in the basement ballroom of the Washington Hilton? Because President Obama made a joke about NPR and the C-SPAN camera wobbled close. This incident highlights for me the wisdom of the New York Times in eschewing this dinner.
The importance of branding. Have decision makers learned NOTHING from Steve Jobs and Apple all these years?
Increasingly, the dynamic in media & politics is about “control of the brand.” NPR could have had no idea that President Obama would single them out, but they knew in advance that the evening was likely to be as it had been in the past: unpredictable and scented with liberal bias.
So what good does it do NPR to order its reporters to refuse food & drink at political events if the brass take tables at highly-publicized affairs that are, if in a different way, just as much about power? Bill Cunningham, on the other hand (and I cannot recommend this movie highly enough), never accepts even a sip at the society events he photographs. He, like the lowly NPR reporter in San Francisco, is very careful about that. And he gives us the whys: the need to maintain distance in his art & craft, the danger of co-option in the fashion world and in New York at large.
The sad thing for me about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whose original purpose of raising scholarship money has been overshadowed by its increasing glitz and celebrity guest list, is that the level of clamor, as well as the media coverage of itself here, suggest that media elites really do not give a damn if Americans question their allegiance.
So what if people out in the heartland think we are in cahoots with power. So what if they no longer trust us. They no longer hear us anyway. We lost that connection sometime back. We speak to an increasingly narrow swathe of the nation’s elites—but does that really matter? We journalists at the very tip top of the profession are doing quite well, thank you. And through TV, radio and Internet we broadcast more widely than ever before. Now THAT is power—and it makes up for a lot, including connection.
Now I’m not saying, as other carpers often do, that there should be no White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Part of the yearly ritual is the dinner bashing, including the obligatory outside-journalist’s piece filled with righteous indignation and the Jay Rosen tweet. I side with Sir Toby Belch here: “Are there to be no more cakes and ale?”
The irony, in which I am guessing they revel, if bemusedly, is that the White House correspondents, the small group of reporters assigned to daily White House coverage, are not Washington elites. The press room has about the same status at the White House as the caddy locker in Caddyshack or steerage on the Titanic. Although television has made some of them familiar faces, the White House press, if no longer quite accurately, think of themselves still as working class grunts, just regular Jills and Joes.
The day I spent in the White House press room was one of the best in my life. And like all good reporters, with an insatiable curiosity, I would have loved to have attended, just once, what the reporters themselves call, increasingly disingenuously, “nerdprom.”
Here is my irony. The one year I might reasonably have expected an invitation—like Donald Trump or Bristol Palin, another guest this year, I would have been asked as a “curiosity”—I would never have gone. In 2008, I would have turned it down without a moment’s hesitation. Are you crazy? I would have thought. I’m in the middle of covering one of the great stories of my lifetime. No way I’m leaving the campaign trail, even for one evening, merely for a party!
And now, even though it is unlikely I would ever get an invite, I still would turn it down–although regretfully. I have sat down at table with politicos whose candidates I have later written about unflatteringly. They would say “I screwed them.” I would say I was telling truth to power. But whatever you call the journalistic act, I have experienced the enormous personal consequences of getting too close. And I have seen other journalists, much better than I, who, comfortable in the anterooms of power, have lost acumen and courage and don’t even seem to know that.
Then there is the irony of last Saturday night for the journalists in the ballroom basement at the DC Hilton. News was breaking: one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons had been killed in a NATO bombing raid. The report was that three small grandchildren had been killed, as well. I’m sure many a newshound at the dinner wished he or she was on the story instead of staring at swag bags.
An even bigger story—likely to be the story of the year—was unfolding elsewhere. No journalist at the Hilton knew. Presumably the only diners who knew were President Obama and Michelle Obama. (I thought at the time her demeanor was strained, odd. Now I conclude her husband must have confided in her about the impending take-down of Osama Bin Laden.)
It’s not reasonable for a DC-based journalist to berate himself or herself for not being on either story. At-the-scene coverage is what counts, at first. But the convergence of American journalism’s annual social whirl with the weekend’s carnage was in its own way a bit of unfortunate branding. The geography of American mass media has never looked more misplaced.
May 7, 2011
