I fell in love with Elayne Boosler in 1993. To be specific, I fell in love with her comedy. She performed at the first White House Correspondents Association dinner I ever attended and proceeded to make a crowd of politicians and reporters and their guests laugh at each other. It was a delicious moment.
Afterward, she was panned in the press and by politicians for her performance.Those in attendance that night in the Washington Hilton’s International Ballroom, however, laughed as hard as anyone I’ve ever seen at a Richard Pryor concert. To criticize her after the event was the height of hypocrisy.
“The best part of the WHCD was the private cocktail party beforehand in a small room off the stage,” Boosler told me. “It was incredible. President Clinton was a wonderful host, down to earth, fun loving. He brought over one of his staff and said, ‘You have to see this. This is so great. Do your Ross Perot for Elayne’. It was surreal and awesome.”
As for the reviews of her performance, she nailed it: “I know the rap on me was that I ‘didn’t do well there’. I got skewered the next day, as does almost every comic whoever performs there. It’s like they laugh, then they’re ashamed and deny it. Kind of the way they are with hookers.”
Hypocrisy has been a mainstay of the dinner for its entirety, and as ubiquitous as floral arrangements at an ostentatious wedding. Women correspondents weren’t even allowed in the event until after I was born. Paula Poundstone was the first woman to host the event – just a year before Boosler.
The event is held annually to present awards and raise scholarship funds; a noble and worthy cause. Since the first dinner in 1921 that cause has drawn entertainers from Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Senor Wences, Duke Ellington, James Cagney, Nat King Cole, Richard Pryor, The Smothers Brothers, Peter Sellers, George Carlin, members of the Rat Pack, Jon Stewart, Ray Romano, Aretha Franklin, Danny Thomas and many others to perform. Jay Leno hosted the event four times. Steve Colbert, appearing in character as a right wing pundit, brought down the house in 2006.
Richard Nixon attended the 1971 dinner. (I was a little young for that one). He later said it was “probably the worst of this type that I have attended,” and said those who attended (politicians and reporters and their guests I presume) were “a drunken group; crude and terribly cruel.”
Indeed, the event has often sparked controversy. While Calvin Coolidge was the first president to attend, Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (who was recuperating from an assassination attempt) and Donald Trump are among those who have refused to show up.
The greatest criticism of the event has been that it exemplifies a coziness that shouldn’t exist among reporters and the White House. So-called social media journalists and bloggers are among those who scream this the loudest – calling it a horrifying example of “access journalism.” I disagree, or at least think that is a terrible misunderstanding of what is going on.
Boosler understands this better than most. “Every business needs that Christmas party where you can let your hair down once a year. When Stephen Colbert performed for George Bush, who was a war criminal, and Colbert found a way to be so brilliantly effective without ever raising an eyebrow in the room, that to me was the height of art and comedy. But the establishment always complained the next day about whoever it was the night before, so really, why do it anymore?”
Sam Donaldson, the ABC reporter who practically wrote the book on covering presidents, feels much the same way. “The dinner is one of the "Institutions" which has no reason to exist except that it has been a ‘tradition’,” he told me.
The truth is, for many reporters who never get their phone calls or emails answered, the annual dinner provides them with a unique opportunity to meet sources faces to face — and it helps build bridges of communication necessary for reporters to do their job — as well as politicians to do their jobs.
Those of us in the business have called it the “Nerd Prom” for years. I first heard that term during the Clinton administration. The part that gets in the way is the event itself seems to have become a cheap knock-off of a Hollywood premiere. There is a red carpet, a receiving line and everything you’ll see at the Oscars or the Emmys. It is rumored that James Carville called Washington, D.C. “Hollywood for ugly people,” after attending a WHCA dinner. On that he is not wrong.
Donaldson understands this better than anyone. “The problem I see (from afar and out of it) is that beginning several decades ago, all these Washington dinners were turned into a celebrity occasion for those who would join Washington and its inhabitants for the notoriety of it,” Donaldson told me. “We were discovered by Hollywood, by the sports stars, by the "somebodies'" who had nothing to do with our business or our responsibilities as journalists but who could preen and revel in enhancing their own celebrity hood” by associating with the reporters who covered them.
Donaldson favors, as I do, killing the current dinner and instituting something more tenable, but less Hollywood in nature. “I would want to go back to the time when journalists got together with the people we covered and broke bread together and told jokes on one another and said, in effect, we are on opposite side of an important fence, but understand each other's job and for one night also say that the conflict these different jobs produce is nothing personal and in the end, we respect each other and remain friends. Well, of course, that is a review that today is no longer tenable,” he said.
That will never happen because there are greater problems. The WHCA is simply useless.
Since Helen Thomas left the WHCA, there has been an increasing and accelerating movement to protect the White House pool and the WHCA board members at the cost of standing up for free speech and supporting all reporters. Current Executive Director Steve Toma has received some of the criticism for this move, as has all the members of the executive board.
Donaldson once told me that you would never know who he cast a vote for in an election based on his actions in the White House. “My job is to ask the hard questions of everyone,” he told me. He also said good politicians like to swing at hard questions. Donald Trump does not like to swing at hard questions.
We need your help to stay independent
Still, when Trump proposed changing up the seating assignments in the Brady Briefing Room, or announced he would take over the pool assignments, many reporters privately didn’t care – or even applauded the move. Trump did it because he believed the pool helped cover up former President Joe Biden’s alleged decline in health. Trump wants softball questions tossed his way. Reporters not in the pool want access to getting their questions answered – even if they are softballs.
Many reporters on the periphery believe the WHCA is preventing them from, not assisting them in, doing their job. That extends to the annual dinner where the pool, board members and the largest media organizations get preferred seating, while smaller outlets – even if they’ve been in the WHCA and covered the president for many years – often get horrible seating assignments at the dinner or none at all.
To them and the public at large the annual dinner has become an “event” where you show up just “to be seen,” and the core mission has been abandoned. It’s all about the board.
So, when the HuffPost announced Friday that it would bring workers fired by Trump to the annual dinner as an act of supporting free speech and fight a “sustained government assault on the federal work force and the press,” some were skeptical and found it to be disingenuous.
After the 2007 dinner, New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that the dinner had become “a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post 9/11 era,” because it “illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows.”
Some organizations have said they will refuse to go to the event, and some journalists have called for the end of the annual event. Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta did just that in a Substack column on Friday. He urged the WHCA to “pull the plug” on the event for a specific reason. While pointing out the anti-constitutional crusade of Donald Trump against the free press, he also said, “Sadly, my friends in the WHCA made matters worse by withdrawing the invitation to comedian Amber Ruffin, apparently under pressure from the White House over some of her comments in the press. WHCA Cancels on Ruffin
This, of course, raises a simple question: How do we celebrate free speech while stifling it? A better course of action would have been to send Ruffin a clear and public message: “We are on your side. See you at the dinner.”
Acosta is right, but doesn’t go far enough. As Boosler told me, “I can’t believe so much of the press is now kowtowing to this tyrant. Sane washing is worse than gaslighting. He surrounds himself with hand-picked reporters. Well, they’re not really reporters, they just play reporters on TV.”
By continuing with the WHCA annual dinner, the impression is that we are, in many ways, part of the problem and not the solution. We are not standing up to authority, we are bowing to it. Firing Ruffin backs up that theory.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
As H.L. Mencken reminded us in 1927 when it comes to reporters, “He is quite content to take more propaganda from Washington. It is not that he is dishonest, but that he is stupid – and, being stupid, a coward.” In 1956, shortly before his death, Mencken went even further; “American journalism is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”
He wasn’t speaking directly about the WHCA, but he certainly could have been.
The organization was cowardly for firing Ruffin after hiring her. Whatever reason that was given, appearance in D.C. is often reality. Ruffin said, "I thought when people take away your rights, erase your history and deport your friends, you’re supposed to call it out. But I was wrong."
Further, the WHCA proved in the first week of Trump’s new administration that it only cares about itself. Faced with threats from Trump regarding pool and briefing room seating assignments, they chose to work with the administration. The WHCA, in tandem with White House, produced the president’s schedule the first week of the new Trump presidency. So, instead of informing the public that the administration wasn’t doing its job, the WHCA jumped in and worked with the White House. That’s a conflict of interest. That’s unforgivable and unimaginable until Donald Trump took office.
To now pretend that the WHCA is a bastion of press freedom is the ultimate hypocrisy. The annual dinner is a sham and a shame. If the WHCA wants to celebrate free speech so damn much it should have a dinner inviting those in the press who have been vilified and marginalized by Trump. It should invite the families of those reporters who’ve died in service of free speech across the globe. It should invite the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters without Borders to highlight the growing problem of press suppression from authoritarians across the planet. Spotlight their efforts. Shine a light on that and I might more inclined to believe you stand for free speech against the Trump regime.
Donaldson often told me when I was a young reporter to never forget why the press was there at the White House. “Our job is to challenge the president,” he told me. Helen Thomas told me it was to do so, “even if you anger other reporters.”
And it was Ben Bagdikian, the former Washington Post editor, who said, “Never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.”
In the face of what reporters must go through every day at the White House during the Donald Trump regime, and the fact that the WHCA has failed so miserably in defending a free press, how can the annual dinner be viewed as anything more than a pale shadow of its former self?
It can’t.
And for those who performed there during its heyday, as Boosler opines, we’ve lost something there as well. “It’s all downhill after you’ve done the WHCD. I mean, is there anything better than making the president of the United States laugh for fifteen minutes? I feel like I helped avert wars.”
That ain’t happening anymore.
Dump the Dinner. Stand up to the bully. Grow some backbone.
Shares