The White House Correspondents' Association Dinner is Terrible for America
The fame obsession is mental poison -- and, sometimes, a weapon
“There was more dignity at my daughter's junior prom… What we're doing with that dinner is saying we're Versailles, we'll let the rest of you eat cake.”
One of the nation’s best known, longtime network news anchors said this and more about the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in an interview more than a decade ago. (More on that below.)
Since then, it’s only gotten worse.
This weekend, the annual spectacle will take place, showing so much of what’s wrong with today’s media: why people have good reason not to trust big news agencies; why Trump and others are able to sail past qualified candidates for the presidency in the minds of so many Americans; why journalists stray so far from their role of providing you the truth, and more. Listen to Episode 53 of They Stand Corrected.
You’ll hear a network’s flagship political show, just the other day, present a popular sports analyst as a contender for the U.S. presidency -- without mentioning that he has no particular set of knowledge or skills for the job. (As I point out in the episode, no diss on him! He’s the one who pointed out what’s wrong with this way of thinking; the journalist did not.)
You'll hear a political operative talk about how the fame obsession led members of his party in Washington to do “evil.” Also, I explain how the media weaponizes fame to skew stories, like that of a pro-terror radical from Columbia University. Speaking of which…
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Also in Episode 53, a crucial lesson today’s media should learn from the Enron scandal more than twenty years ago.
To find out who that longtime news anchor is and what else he said, listen to the episode or keep scrolling if you’re a paid subscriber.