Senator John Kerry, who ran against Bush in the 2004 election, commented, “If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he’s even more out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately for the president, this is not a joke. 585 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year, 3,354 have been wounded and there’s no end in sight. George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven’t found them, and now he thinks that’s funny?”301
At the 2010 dinner Barack Obama joked about killing people with drones which had become a controversial new topic since the technology was now being used to kill people with the remote control aircraft.302 While much of the audience laughed, others who are not part of the elite White House press corps didn’t think it was so funny. Alex Pareene at Salon wrote, “It’s funny, because Predator drone strikes in Pakistan have killed literally hundreds of completely innocent civilians, and now the president is evincing a casual disregard for those lives he is responsible for ending by making a lighthearted joke.”303
After the 2007 dinner, New York Times columnist Frank Rich claimed that the paper would stop attending the event, saying it is, “a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era,” and that it “illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows.”304
The New York Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet later confirmed they would stop going, saying, “We came to the conclusion that it had evolved into a very odd, celebrity-driven event that made it look like the press and government all shuck their adversarial roles for one night of the year, sing together (literally, by the way) and have a grand old time cracking jokes. It just feels like it sends the wrong signal to our readers and viewers, like we are all in it together and it is all a game. It feels uncomfortable.”305
While working for Rolling Stone magazine, Michael Hastings revealed that many journalists write “puff pieces” in order to cozy up with government officials hoping to gain or maintain access to them.306 A column in The Guardian denouncing the White House Correspondents Dinner stated that “Journalism’s job is to speak truth to power◦— not refill its glass and laugh at its jokes,” and highlighted that in their view, “The celebrities sitting at almost every table of the Washington Hilton gave the distinct impression that both journalism and politics are now wholly beholden to the whims of the entertainment-industrial complex.”307
In 2013 New York Times Magazine’s Chief National Correspondent Mark Leibovich said that journalists in Washington D.C. have become a “celebrity class.”308 When asked why his paper doesn’t have reporters attend the dinner, he said, “There’s a level of self-congratulation and self-celebration and so forth that can be very, you know, somewhat at odds with the mood of the country and how people view the media. It did not feel like the right message to be sending to our readers to really be, you know, in such a chummy in sort of festive setting with the people we’re covering.”309
BuzzFeed, the clickbait bottom feeders of the Internet, whose articles mostly consist of a few lines of text accompanied by animated Gifs, were granted press credentials and a table at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, to give you an idea of how low the standards are for who they consider to be ‘journalists.’ The Huffington Post is also a member of the White House Press Corps and are granted access to the presidential daily briefings where they are allowed to ask the president or his press secretary direct questions.
It certainly is odd that the people who are supposed to function as watchdogs and keep administrations accountable are wining and dining with them. The inside jokes and the overall atmosphere of the dinner reeks of elitism and hypocrisy and is just one more example of the collusion between the top mainstream media outlets and the people they’re supposed to hold accountable.
University of Texas Radio-Television and Film professor América Rodriguez points out, “The ownership of the national media system is centralized in very few hands. These owners, and the journalists they employ, in turn have close personal and professional relationships with the political elites of their respective nations. The interaction of these two factors◦— ownership concentration and the tight web of relations within the political elite◦— has created national news production processes intent on safeguarding privilege and status.”310
The government is actually the most frequent source of news, so a cozy relationship between politicians and journalists further tarnishes the credibility of their reporting. One study showed 46% of stories from The Washington Post and The New York Times originated from the government.311 Another primary source of ‘news’ is from what’s been dubbed ‘churnalism,’ which is when news outlets use press releases sent by government agencies or corporations as the basis for stories and often report the information contained in them virtually verbatim.312 The term refers to journalists quickly “churning out” stories from the information they mostly just take from press releases or news wires, often without even fact checking it or doing any original research.
Part of the churnalism problem comes from the constant pressure to continuously keep posting new content in our never-ending 24-7 news cycle. This leaves reporters little time to do original research or fact-check, because there is an urgency to “be first” to post a story in hopes of having it go viral so it drives a bunch of traffic to their website. A study by British journalist Nick Davies found that 80% of the stories in British newspapers were just rewritten wire copy and press releases.313
The tone of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner dramatically changed when Donald Trump became president. As the first dinner of the Trump administration approached, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker announced that they would not be attending “in protest” because of the way Trump was treating the media.314 Then sources within CNN and MSNBC revealed that those networks were considering boycotting the 2017 dinner as well.315
Then President Trump trumped the media again, and announced that he wasn’t going to go, breaking a long-held tradition of presidents attending, and instead held a rally to celebrate his first 100 days in office. “I’m treated very unfairly and very dishonestly by the press and I thought it was inappropriate to go this year. If I were treated even slightly fairly by the press I would have gone,” Trump said. “I thought it would be very disingenuous if I went. I thought it would be actually, in a certain way, dishonest if I went.”316