Here’s why I fear that Washington DC is doomed: its biggest event each year – the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner – is a week-long, boozy, self-congratulatory series of parties sponsored by corporations and special interests, and hardly anyone in Washington seems to think that it’s much of a problem.
The most powerful city in the world has not only shamelessly become conditioned to its own ill-repute, they’ve actually come to celebrate it.
The hub of the party lineup is the always-sold-out White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner that more than 2,600 people attend at the Washington Hilton. The president attends and cracks some jokes; so does an actual comedian (Stephen Colbert, Joel McHale, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, Wanda Sykes, Jay Leno, Craig Ferguson have all recently performed). I observed and covered it for 10 years and, during that time, I saw it become Washington’s Superbowl, and a marvellous opportunity for corporations and special interest to get access to the powerful.
That dinner spawned two dozen other parties around town, so it all drags on for a week. It has become the single best opportunity to be around, lobby and influence Washington power players – and to show that you’re a player yourself – which is why companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, AOL, Viacom, Mercedes-Benz, Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Siemens, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola and Altria have all had a presence in recent years. It’s hard not to think that, in the wake of lobbying reform, this has become yet another loophole for outside influences to win the hearts and minds of Washington’s media and political elites.
Can things get better? Can Washington make its biggest moment each year about something more meaningful than vodka bars, BMWs in the lobby and ice sculptures?
Sadly, probably not – because Washingtonians don’t care for it to. Many people inside the Beltway maintain that all the schmoozing and networking that makes the “Nerd Prom” an embarrassment to people not in the room is just how Washington is, and that critics like me should get over it. But that’s a level of cynicism for which I’m not ready yet. It’s this culture of Washington that makes the rest of America hold us in such low esteem.
But as uncomfortable as it is to watch everyone in Washington in permanent air-kiss mode for a week, basking in the reflected glory of the celebrities who show up, the real problem with the event isn’t that the Washington press corps is too cozy with the powerful. The real problem is that the event masks that the press corps increasingly has almost no access to the White House that would enable it to better inform the American people.
White House correspondents have found it increasingly difficult to get any real access at the White House, much less actual information out of it. Reporters go weeks – months, even – without getting a chance to ask the president for his perspective on the news of the day. Freedom of Information requests have gotten slower and more expensive, according the Associated Press’s Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee. And the Obama administration has gone after leakers so aggressively that the USA Today’s Susan Page called the administration’s treatment of the press the “most restrictive” and “most dangerous” in American history.
It’s not sexy to rally behind journalists, and especially behind White House correspondents, given their historically privileged and choice assignments, but the reporters closest to the most powerful man in the world on a daily basis are the best thing that the American public have to a proxy in the White House. It’s a scary world when any White House no longer feels the need – morally or politically – to routinely take tough questions from some of those who know them best. And it’s scarier still when this town does nothing to stop it.
