What Happened at the White House Correspondents' Dinner - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The first White House Correspondents’ Dinner was held in 1921, at the Arlington Hotel in Washington, D.C., a couple blocks north of the presidential residence. The event’s purpose was practical: to inaugurate the new officers of the group that had been formed to advocate for the interests of the journalists who kept the public informed about the doings of the American presidency. The dinner involved just 50 guests, who, in addition to the business of the evening, sang songs and made jokes and managed to have, as one attendee put it, “such fun as the Prohibition Era afforded.”
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She was also highlighting the existential tension at the heart of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. During a time of anxiety about the fate of essential democratic norms, the dinner has served, in its awkward way, as evidence on the other side: as a reminder that some of those norms, particularly when they involve cocktail parties, can in fact have a remarkable staying power. The current president—who might well, the lore goes, have decided to run for the office after being mocked by his predecessor at the 2011 WHCD—has for two years declined to attend the dinner. (“Is this better than that phony Washington White House Correspondents’ Dinner?” Trump asked the crowd at the rally he held in Michigan as the Washington event was taking place.) The A-list celebrities who once walked the event’s red carpet (or, in this case, a step-and-repeat assembled near the escalators of the basement lobby of the Washington Hilton) have largely stopped showing up.
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The most striking moment of Wolf’s set, though, was when the comedian tore into the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was representing the Trump administration on the dinner’s stage, and sitting just a few feet away from Wolf. With biting jokes like, “I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale.” And: “[Sarah Sanders] burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye.” And: “Like, what’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Oh, I know. Aunt Coulter.”
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There were also roasted-beet salads with honeyed goat cheese, and dessert trays (panna cotta, cheesecake, tartlets featuring raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries) that formed a pretty assemblage of reds, whites, and blues. There were dinner plates featuring both monkfish and filets of beef: the surf and the turf, the this and the that, entrees suggesting that, despite the evidence to the contrary, it is possible to have it both ways. There was Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian American social activist who was imprisoned for nearly three years for those activities, speaking passionately, via a prerecorded video, about her ordeal—and the journalistic work that led to her liberation. There were journalism awards presented to reporters who cover the White House. There were announcements of the recipients of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association scholarships—the college students who may come to serve as the next generation of White House correspondents. “This night is about you, and what you’ve accomplished,” Talev told them.
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If one person can eclipse an entire evening’s worth of celebration—the military show, the scholarships, the awards, the urgent discussion of the profound necessity of press freedom—that’s a good sign that something should change about the evening. There’s the Correspondents’ Dinner as an event, and the Correspondents’ Dinner as a norm; both would benefit, at this point, from scaling back to become something smaller, more intimate, more meaningful—less about celebrity, less about comedy, and more about journalism. A smaller dinner would be more boring, definitely, but also more in line with journalism’s own best vision of itself: as a watchdog, as a safeguard, as an extension of the curiosity of the American people.