The White House Correspondents’ dinner, enthusiastically called “nerd prom” for years by Washington journalists looking for champagne and selfies, is sobering up, with next week’s gala drawing few celebrities, no president, and now no press secretary.
As if to rub in the lost luster of the event, instead of the usual comedian, a historian will serve as the “entertainment.”
President Trump, snubbing the dinner a third time to host a rally, diverted top aides from the gala, while a faction within the White House Correspondents’ Association nixed the comedy routine, resulting in the least glitzy gathering in decades.
C-SPAN hasn’t even scheduled coverage of the April 27 event.
As of Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who will accompany Trump to Wisconsin, had not said if Trump will send a head table representative, the association’s President Olivier Knox told the Washington Examiner.
Among those skipping the event is Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, a source said. White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said he was “not sure yet” if he will go.
Many journalists are happy about the changes, believing the dinner descended into an embarrassing spectacle that sent the wrong message about journalism: that boozing and schmoozing with leaders was more important than holding them accountable.
But other reporters believe that a cheery night at the Washington Hilton was a fitting reward for a year of hard work.
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In fact, former association president George Condon, an authority on the history of the dinner, said almost from the beginning the event has been about fun and seeing celebrities.
“The entertainment, it’s always been in the DNA of the dinner,” he said. “There’s this myth that celebrities somehow came into being in the 1980s. That’s not true. They were there in the ’30s. … Before it was Hollywood, it was vaudeville, radio and early TV.”
The first dinner was held in 1921. Only Trump has skipped three years in a row, though President Dwight D. Eisenhower also declined three invites total, Condon said. Since the early days, celebrity attendees helped draw officials. Silent movie stars and radio personalities gave way to pop musicians and TV stars. In 1963, Barbra Streisand performed.
President Calvin Coolidge gave the first presidential speech to the dinner in 1924, and it was so tedious that for decades presidents were expected to say little more than “thank you,” though Franklin D. Roosevelt twice used the dinner for World War II-themed addresses, Condon said. A major pivot happened when John F. Kennedy was funny, making jokes the new norm.
[Also read: Michelle Wolf knocks Trump for skipping White House Correspondents’ Dinner]
A dedicated comedian was added in 1983 to revive interest in the event.
“The dinner went through an extraordinarily boring phase in the 1970s. The dinner was at risk of dying because it was so boring and the entertainment was so bad,” Condon said.
After the revival, the event reached new Hollywood heights under President Barack Obama, as celebrities poured into Washington, some unable to name a White House correspondent.
“I think it’s great that the president isn’t attending,” said Patrick Gavin, a former Politico journalist whose 2015 documentary “Nerd Prom” cast an unflattering light on the dinner. “It dials down the distracting celebrity quotient and allows the dinner to more closely focus on its important message about journalism and access. I hope this lasts.”
Gavin said that during Obama’s years in office, “The weekend’s narcissistic and ugly image became too hard to ignore,” and now the association “will definitely sell less tickets and attract fewer eyeballs, but it will make an important stop towards restoring its credibility.”
Knox, the president of the association and a SiriusXM journalist, ran for his position in 2016 on a platform of “reclaiming the dinner for journalists” and said he’s proud of the direction the dinner is taking.
“I warmly welcome celebrity support, but we reached a point where you were more likely to run into a sitcom star than a sound engineer, and that’s not healthy,” he said.
The dinner still is likely to have more White House officials than in 2017, when the White House imposed a ban on attendance. In 2018, there was a thaw, with Sanders attending and finding herself the butt of jokes about being dishonest. This year, some White House officials have RSVP’d, indicating there’s not a blanket ban.
Mike McCurry, a White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, said it’s right for Trump and Sanders not to attend.
“I think it is appropriate that a president who declares the press ‘the enemy of the people’ and a press secretary who treats the White House press corps with utter disdain refrain from attending these events. They should, in fact, not be invited,” McCurry said.
Though drained of stars, Condon — a National Journal reporter who is finishing a book on the history of the correspondents association — said he doubts the current phase will last.
“I never found it cringe-worthy in the slightest. People act as though we are supposed to go to the dinner and have serious conversations about monetary policy and the direction of the Fed,” Condon said. “I think you will see a return to entertainment and fun at the dinner, even if President Trump is reelected. People want to have fun.”
