I forced myself to take in every minute of the coverage of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Good God, was it awful!! It had its anticipated lean to the left, but not as bad as some in the past.
CNN offered gavel-to-gavel coverage. That means while the guests were getting seated and eating their dinners, there was no effort to put anything on camera at the Dinner. Instead, we were entertained (?) with an hour or so of anchor folks and panelists talking about the dinner – past and present, but mostly past.
You had CNN’s numbers cruncher Harry Enten giving the red-carpet treatment to … CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Their banter included a who’s-on-first style routine over who is in the situation room – Blitzer’s roost at CNN. Enten kiddingly said the show was his situation room. They decided that everything was a situation room. (I am still not laughing.)
After listening to banal banter for the better part of an hour, the cameras finally shifted to the Dinner – which was even more boring and less enjoyable than the media in constant praise of its own industry.
Tamara Keith, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, gave the same speech I have heard over the years – gushy over-the-top praise for the industry and all the practitioners in the room. Association dinners and award programs always engage in self-praise, but not to this level. The audience was fed mush to the point of regurgitation.
Then came the awards, with the same boilerplate speeches from the past. The names and faces of the recipients were different, but the flattering introductions were not.
(Back in my Chicago days, I ran a lot of award dinners. I had a rule. Give the awards quickly and limit the thank you speeches to ten words. That is because I understood an underlying truth. The only folks interested in the awards are those giving them and those getting them. The audience is eager to move on. But I digress.)
Finally, it was President Biden’s time to perform. Yes, he tried a few self-deprecating jokes that drew a minimum level of polite chuckles. He had a few jibes at President Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But mostly, he used his time and teleprompter to give his boilerplate campaign speech.
Ironically, he spent a lot of time addressing American citizens held by hostile regimes in places like Russia, China, Iran, and Syria — especially journalists. Biden repeatedly emphasized that his administration will never forget them and how he works on their behalf daily. If this were a Pinocchio movie, we would have seen the nose elongating. Come on, man. No one is going to believe that malarkey – especially the families of those held hostages.
Just to placate the whataboutism folks, Trump is no humorist either. Neither Biden nor Trump has the wit of Presidents Lincoln, Reagan, Obama, or Bush (the second).
This year’s comic relief was presented by Roy Wood, Jr. He got a few laughs … a few polite laughs … a few moans. He went very soft on Biden. He did not roast the President. His most pointed jokes were directed at Tucker Carlson, FOX News, and President Trump.
Wood did have a theme for part of his stand-up routine. He brought up scandals as the underlying subject. He led off with Trump, but he did take a couple of jibs at CNN’s Don Lemon. He brought up GOP Congressman George Santos.
What screamed across the screen, however, is what Wood did NOT jest about. The Hunter Biden scandals. It was such an obvious omission that Wood lost all credibility as a fair and bipartisan jokester. No scandal provided potentially more material for roast-style humor.
If he was not going to make jokes about Hunter, Wood should never have made scandals one of his main themes. I suspect that his obvious omission brought the Hunter issues to the minds of everyone in the audience – in the room and in telly land.
The post-event wrap-up commentary was more objective than I expected. Oh yeah. There was the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell’s panty-dampening praise of President Biden’s mediocre performance. Ironically, it was former Biden/Harris 2020 staffer Ashley Allison who thought Wood’s set the right tone with his jibes at both rightwing and leftwing hypocrisy.
CNN’s Scott Jennings had the most negative assessment of the Biden speech – arguing that the President was mocking the press when he talked about how he always takes questions. Scott emphatically stated that Biden’s claim was more malarkey. “He does not take questions from the press.”
The best part of the evening was the high points from previous dinners. Overall, I would say that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner lived up to its reputation – and that is not necessarily a compliment.
So, there ‘tis.