Ron Fournier at the National Journal blistered Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner, where celebrities and the permanent political class members — and the reporters who are supposed to keep them accountable — wine and dine the weekend away, oblivious to the stark realities outside the Washington “Boomtown” bubble.
The publication wrote Washington, “never looks more out of touch than it will this weekend, when movie stars, music moguls, media mavens and their advertisers” gallivant around Washington, D.C., which NBC newsman Tom Brokaw compared to Versailles.
Referred to by D.C. denizens as “nerd prom,” the dinner, Fournier writes, was “established decades ago to encourage comity between reporters and The Reported,” but has “in recent years been overshadowed by star-gazing, extravagant parties and the antics of hired comics.”
Fournier writes that the dinner is just “lousy optics” – especially when the country is mired in economic struggles and joblessness, a ballooning federal debt, the Boston Marathon and West, Texas tragedies, and the “blood-red line in Syria.”