Frank Rich: They Don’t Report. You Don’t Have to Decide.

[Me.]

“DESPITE the major environmental disaster unfolding in the Gulf and the attempted terror attack on New York’s Times Square, President Obama spent his Saturday night laughing it up at the White House Correspondents Dinner,” griped Sean Hannity of Fox News last week. His complaint is not inaccurate. But it’s hardly the whole story. Also laughing it up at that dinner were many of the country’s television news potentates, including some of Hannity’s own colleagues. And unlike the president, they were caught napping on a night that could have been 9/11 redux..

Here’s the time line from last Saturday. At 6:30 p.m. the abandoned Nissan Pathfinder was found smoking in Times Square. Relevant public officials marooned at the correspondents dinner in Washington quickly got word. Over the next hour and a half, several news organizations spread it as well while Times Square was evacuated. To clear the Broadway theater district at curtain time on Saturday night isn’t like emptying a high school; it’s a virtual military operation. By 8 p.m., the crossroads of the world looked like a ghost town, yet if you tuned in to a cable news network, it wasn’t news. No one seemed to know or to care. On MSNBC, which I was watching, it didn’t even merit a mention on a crawl.

MSNBC was instead busy covering the correspondents dinner itself, so we could feast on journalists schmoozing with mostly B-list show business folk — and sometimes C-list, as in Kim Kardashian. (Another NBC employee, Jay Leno, was the evening’s mirthless comic headliner.) This annual Beltway fete, once safely quarantined on C-Span, has now mutated into a poor man’s Golden Globes on all three cable news networks. On MSNBC, this meant red-carpet arrivals, in-depth historical analysis of past dinners, and morning-after post-mortems by network news stars wearing sunglasses on camera (just like Hollywood!).

One dinner attendee, Rachel Sklar, would later write on AOL News that, Michael Bloomberg aside, reports of the bomb “didn’t seem to interfere with anyone else’s evening.” That MSNBC couldn’t be bothered to interrupt its two-hour coverage of these festivities to report on the attempted bombing was particularly embarrassing, given that the network’s headquarters are just blocks from Times Square. If NBC journalists in the Washington Hilton ballroom were too busy gawking at Justin Bieber to pounce on the bulletins moving through the BlackBerry-and-Twittersphere, you’d think someone back in New York would.”…cont…

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/opinion/09rich.html

[Captain Hilts]

1. The WH Correspondents' dinner is generally in poor taste and is wretched excess. nt

[Me.]

3. It Has Become A Joke In And Of Itself

Not to mention in poor taste to be fawning over the glitterati when so many people no longer have a roof over their heads.

[housewolf]

2. Thank you, Frank Rich, for being the only one to FINALLY speak up about this!

It's only taken 1 whole week to finally make that connection

[Captain Hilts]

4. Rich has certainly peddled his share of opinions as facts. nt

[Rex]

5. CNN/Fauxsnews and clones report on entertainment that meets

their political bosses approval and news if it is death or could cause death or scandal that could ruin a person. If it goes against their Paymasters, then they drop it or try to spin it in their favor. Always.

[Warpy]

6. While I agree that the Correspondent's Dinner has outlived any usefulness

I suspect this year's dismally boring incarnation will safely sequester it once again on CSPAN.

However, I disagree that the news out of NYC was all that compelling. It might have been had the truck been more competently rigged, or even if it had fully caught fire and all the poorly conceived innards exposed later. However, it was a botched job that the fire department dealt with in less than 15 minutes with a fire extinguisher.

This wasn't compelling news to be breathlessly reported by hugely coiffed reporters skilled in bafflegab nonstop for 24 hours. It was the kind of thing that should have been handled with the outstanding police work we saw plus minor snippets on regularly scheduled news.

Corporate news fearmongering has gotten old, people.