Brokaw Rips White House Correspondents Dinner: 'We're Versailles'

For those of you who might not know or care, the White House Correspondents Dinner is an annual orgy of narcissistic self-indulgence where the biggest stars in media, Hollywood, and politics gather to become even more corrupt and insulated than they already are. It is also a decidedly left-wing affair where the media hoot, holler, and applaud as Barack Obama attacks his political opponents, and do the same when Stephen Colbert rips George W. Bush.

In a word, the dinner is a grotesque display of “journalists” yukking it up and slapping the backs of those in power whom they are supposed to hold accountable. Just as grotesque is watching the same gilded media, who protect Obama from his failed economy, celebrate their own corrupt one-percent selves as the poverty they willfully ignore explodes all around them.

Things have gotten so bad that the E! entertainment channel is going to broadcast live from the event tomorrow night, and Tom Brokaw has felt the need to again speak out against it. Last year Brokaw surprised many when he made this statement about the event on “Meet the Press”:

What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country? Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles? And what comes through the screen on C-SPAN that night is the latter, and not the former.

This year, Brokaw doubled down with this statement to Politico:

But I think any organization… has to have a kind of self-policing instinct and what we’re doing with that dinner, as it has been constituted for the past several years, is saying, ‘We’re Versailles. The rest of you eat cake.’

Fox News’s Ed Henry (a very good reporter who covers the White House), the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (the organizers behind the dinner), is trying to put the best face on the proceedings he can by emphasizing the money raised for scholarships. But since the election of Barack Obama and the crashing of our economy, what once came off as a fairly formal and even stiff affair now reeks of excess, cronyism, throne-kissing, and all-about-meism.

One positive, I guess, is the honesty. What’s known as Nerd Prom is the rare time the media remove the phony mask of the ink-stained, working class crusader of truth to reveal the supreme imperial ugliness that slithers beneath.

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC