BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a dazzling display of media narcissism, is slipping from memory now. But before it does, the Association ought to think seriously about not doing it next year. The spectacle is an embarrassment to journalism and the American Presidency. It reinforces an awful perception of Washington culture.
The dinner is an annual affair put on by the White House Correspondents Association under the guise of a fundraising event for journalism scholarships, but it isn’t that at all. The paltry amount of money the Association gives out in scholarships that night could be raised with a tin cup at the corner of Connecticut and K streets in DC.
The newspaper Politico said that the Association has only made $583,000 in scholarship awards in the last 20 years. That averages out to $29,150 a year. The Association website reported this year’s awards at $132,000. Politico said there were 2,800 guests at the dinner, which would mean the scholarship money amounted to no more than $47 per guest. Usually at dinners of this type, some guests are comped–let in free. But those who do pay or have their ticket paid for them, fork over $1,000 a plate.
We don’t know how much the dinner actually grossed or netted, but the numbers raise questions about why there is so little left over for the scholarships.
The reality is the scholarships and other journalist awards handed out that night are a thinly-veiled cover for what has become not just a dinner, but a week-long media celebration of self. It reminds you of the pagan worship scene in the Cecil B. DeMille 1956 classic, The Ten Commandments, that took place while Moses was sweltering in front of the burning bush atop Mount Sinai. The week is one party after another with all the glitz and glamour, lavish meals and mediocre wines, celebrities and paparazzi of Oscar week in Hollywood.
Some of the pre and post-dinner parties were hosted by People and Time magazines, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, Google and the Hollywood Reporter, MSNBC, the McLaughlin Group and Reuters, Bloomberg and Vanity Fair, and The Creative Coalition (on whose advisory board I serve).
The celebrity roster for the dinner was a who’s who of glitter, glamour, military brass, political heavyweights and Washington money.
Hollywood celebrities included Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, Daniel-Day Lewis, Reese Witherspoon, Goldie Hawn, Sofia Vergara, Elizabeth Banks and George Clooney, one Hollywood celeb who has paid his citizenship dues. The brass included General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Army Chief of Staff, Ray Odierno. The room was full of politicians, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Florida Congressman Allen West, Virginia Congressman Tim Scott and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, among many others. There were several Cabinet secretaries, an ambassador or two, and a host of White House and Obama campaign staffers.
But there was another group of celebrities present whose participation the media did not report. If it weren’t for a passing camera shot or two on C-Span or a brief mention in a Politico Playbook, you would not have known they were there. Who were ‘they’? Lobbyists—the Washington insiders– of course. They paid plenty for their tables and invited guests, but their presence was covered up.
I went on website after website and could not find a mention or a list of the Washington insiders in attendance. I am technologically challenged, so I could have easily misapplied a keystroke or two, but there was nothing there, not even on the Association’s website, which was chock full of large color photos of the celebrities, military brass and politicians in attendance, but no glossies of lobbyists (in full disclosure, I quit after viewing the first fifty).
It is interesting and ironic that this charity dinner is one of the few that have survived in Washington. Many others like the Vince Lombardi Cancer Center dinner had to fold their tents, along with similar charitable golf and tennis tournaments that raised millions if not billions for good causes over the decades in Washington. Why? They were, in part, victims of the media, portrayed as unseemly, a cozy way for politicians and lobbyists to mingle and engage in the peddling of influence under the cover of charitable giving.
Eventually rules were adopted and laws were passed that discouraged organizations from sponsoring them and discouraged politicians and lobbyists from attending. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which as was noted, raises relatively little in charitable giving, survived and flourished, untouched by criticism and unfettered by oversight.
The White House Correspondents’ weekend of over-indulgence is a reflecting pool of what’s wrong with Washington and why changing the political paradigm to address the public’s hardening disgust with politics and government will be so difficult.
It is events like this gratuitous weekend that make people think Washington is the last place on earth the country’s problems can be solved, when in reality it is probably the only place they are going to be solved. The solutions, however, won’t happen or certainly won’t be lasting, without a fundamental transformation in the behavior of the troika of power in Washington, first and foremost the media.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.