Reality and Reality TV at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

By David Corn  May 3, 2022

Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson pose for photographers as they arrive at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on April 30, 2022. Jose Luis Magana/AP

“Over there! Over there!”

The people at my table at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night and those around us were standing and peering toward the entrance. In their tuxes and gowns, attendees were wiggling out of the tight spaces that we had been packed into to get a better view. Some were leaning on neighbors or practically climbing over them.

“There! There!” Phones were being waved over heads, and shutter buttons pressed frantically.

“Right there!”

It was Kim Kardashian. She had entered the massive ballroom at the Washington Hilton, after the rest of us had taken our seats and started poking at our salads. Immediately a scrum had formed around her. “She’s talking to Martha. I got a photo!” That would be Martha Stewart. “And Pete’s with her.” SNLer Pete Davidson, her tattooed beau.

The president of the United States was at the head table, as was The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. Cabinet members and politicians were sprinkled throughout the crowd. But all eyes were on Kim.

Now before you start to draw conclusions about the vacuousness of the Washington press corps, let me point out that of the 2,600 swells crammed into this cavernous room, many, if not most, are not journalists—and they’re not high-powered government officials brought to the dinner as guests. They are people from or related to the business side of media companies and TV and radio networks, or advertisers, or people with the right connections to get into a fancy shindig. So the oohing and aahing over KK and her co-stars was not reflective of the hard-working reporters who cover the ins and outs of the nation’s capital every day.

Though the dinner—derisively nicknamed the “nerd prom”—has been assailed for promoting a cozy and clubby atmosphere in which reporters and politicians yuk it up together over so-so wine and the best surf-and-turf meal that can be expected when thousands must be served at the same time, I’ve never been able to raise my dudgeons too high about the event. Maybe that’s because I get to spend the night out with a lot of reporter pals whose work I often respect and occasionally envy. If the secretary of defense is sipping a blue-ish cocktail nearby, it doesn’t make much difference to me.

The dinners are best known for speeches made by the president and, usually, a comedian—though Donald Trump refused to attend when he was in the White House. That yielded a great Joe Biden line: “This is the first time a president attended this dinner in six years. It's understandable. We had a horrible plague—followed by two years of Covid.” And Michelle Wolf’s sharp routine in 2018 led to so much pearl-clutching then that it seemed she might be the last comic standing at the dinner. The following year, the WHCA booked Alexander Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow instead of a professional funny person. But now post-pandemic—or, sort of—a president was back, and so was a satirist.

Both Biden and Noah played it well. But what’s less well-known about the dinners is that the White House Correspondents’ Association does try to use this gala to promote journalism by highlighting its scholarships for college students and by handing out awards to its members for work deemed exemplary. This year it posthumously honored Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne, the first two Black women to serve in the White House press corps. It gave prizes to worthy journalistic endeavors, including Axios reporter Jonathan Swann’s account of Trump’s final days in the White House, and ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl’s reporting on the January 6 riot. And there was much somber talk from Biden, Noah, and others about the need for no-holds-barred journalism in these tough days.

Amen to that, of course. But these dinners are a reminder that the news media, like much of the rest of the world, is better at self-congratulation than self-examination. The journalism sector overall has not fully come to terms with the failures that helped Trump, an avowed enemy of the free press, gain power. Television news afforded him an estimated $2 billion in free media by providing his 2016 campaign rallies extensive live coverage. (Remember then–CBS CEO Leslie Moonves’ observation: “It may not be good for America. But it’s damn good for CBS.”) Many aspects of Trump’s recent and distant past were not sufficiently probed, including his mob ties, assorted business deals, and serious financial conflicts of interest. Moreover, the political press failed to adequately cover the election attack that was launched by Vladimir Putin to boost Trump’s chances. Instead, the media gobbled up the Democratic emails and memos stolen by Russian cyber-operatives and distributed on a near-daily basis by WikiLeaks, and they spewed out a never-ending series of stories that hampered Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It’s not that such stories should have been suppressed, but the media failed to provide the crucial context that all this was part of a Kremlin operation designed to benefit Trump. In an election that was decided by 77,000 votes across three states, this failure, no doubt, was one of several factors that determined the outcome.

The Trump-Russia blunder was as significant as the media’s inadequate and misleading WMD coverage in 2002 and 2003. The latter led to a war in which several thousand American service members and 200,000 or so Iraqi civilians perished. The media’s Trump failure conceivably helped him reach the White House—and that resulted in many disasters, including hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths during the Covid pandemic.

This past week, Dr. Deborah Birx, who has been trying to rehab her image while promoting a book, noted that more honesty and better policies from the Trump administration could have prevented 30 percent of Covid deaths. That’s a remarkable statement from the Trump White House Covid response coordinator. This means Trump and his crew were responsible for hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. What could be a greater indictment of an administration? It’s stunning that such a fact doesn’t shape all debates about Trump and the GOP—and that it did not receive more attention within the media. Lapses like this ought to trigger media self-reflection.

During the dinner, I did feel all warm and fuzzy when speakers talked about how crucial it is for journalists to expose and chronicle attacks on democracy and human decency and cited the work and sacrifices of reporters in Ukraine. Though Noah poked fun at the media bigfoots (Chuck Todd, Fox News, the stillborn CNN+), he ended on a serious note: "Ask yourself this question: If Russian journalists who are losing their livelihoods…and their freedom for daring to report on what their own government is doing—if they had the freedom to write any words, to show any stories or to ask any questions, if they had, basically, what you have, would they be using it in the same way that you do?" That’s a damn good question. With democracy threatened here and abroad, with climate change endangering much of the planet, with multiple crises afflicting our nation, with disinformation, false panics, and trivialities undermining our national discourse, is the media focused on the right stuff? Often it is. But not always. “American democracy is not a reality show,” Biden said at the event. At times, it certainly feels like one. The dinner was a good reminder of how hard it is to look away when Kim Kardashian is nearby.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

WeCrashed. Elizabeth Holmes and The Dropout, Anna Sorokin and Inventing Anna, the “Bad Vegan”—there’s been a rash of miniseries about real-life scoundrels. After true-crime tales, it seems we are fascinated with phonies who fly high and crash hard. In 2021, Hulu released a fascinating documentary on the rise and fall of WeWork, the flexible workspace company founded by the messianic Adam Neumann that in 2019 went from a valuation of $47 billion to near-bankruptcy in a matter of weeks. It was one of the mightiest corporate collapses in history—and a tale of hubris and bullshit. Neumann’s ability to con money out of some of the more influential financial titans was almost unbelievable. (Jamie Dimon, I am looking at you.) And the documentary did a fabulous job of capturing key elements of the story: reckless corporate credulity, the internal party-cult culture at WeWork, Neumann’s skillful exploitation of charisma, and the impact of New Age–ish Rebekah Neumann, Adam’s wife, on the company and its implosion. (Rebekah is the cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, so extra celebrity points!) Now Apple TV+ has followed up on the documentary and a podcast with an eight-part dramatic miniseries, WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the First Couple of WeWork.

The series covers the full story: Adam’s transformation from a failed salesman peddling onesies with kneepads to a corporate prophet, the bacchanal-ish WeWork retreats, the internal intrigues within the company, the many excesses of the Neumanns (facilitated by Dimon giving Adam $300 million or so in a personal line of credit), and Rebekah’s insecurities, which helped drive the company off the cliff. But with the villains—that is, the Neumanns—being portrayed by Leto and Hathaway, who put in impressive performances, the miniseries cannot help but over-glamorize the couple. These two actors are each too beautiful, and the shimmer they bring to their characters is distracting.

What’s most interesting about the story of WeWork is that Neumann truly had a wonderful idea: providing hip, communal workspaces for the gig economy. And he implemented it. WeWork set up communities across the country and around the world. This is far different from Holmes’ scam at Theranos. She had a thrilling idea: a blood test that could search for multiple diseases and conditions from a single drop. But her company never came up with a device that could do this, and she lied to investors and consumers about that. It was a complete fraud. Neumann made his concept a reality, but he and Rebekah, in pursuit of personal wealth and other ambitions, burned through the company’s money and failed to guide the company responsibly. This screwed the firm’s employees (and its investors). In the end, the Neumanns walked away with about a billion bucks—and they got to be portrayed by Leto and Hathaway. All this makes the WeWork saga frustrating. If you don’t want to feel suckered by them, perhaps stick to the documentary.

The Survivor. Last September in this newsletter, I wrote about the best Holocaust movie you couldn’t see. I had recently written the first media story about this film, called The Survivor and directed by Barry Levinson. At the time—when few movies were being released in theaters due to the pandemic—it had surprisingly not been picked up by a network or streaming service. But after the movie received wonderful reviews at the Toronto Film Festival, HBO bought The Survivor, and it can now be watched on the premium cable channel or through HBO Max. You should do so. The Survivor is a brilliant piece of work. Here’s the item from last year’s newsletter (and if you want a deeper dive into the movie and its fascinating backstory, check out my article):

I’m going to be a bit unfair here and recommend a movie you can’t see—yet: The Survivor, the new Barry Levinson film based on the real-life story of Harry Haft, who was deported to Auschwitz and then sent to the Jaworzno slave-labor camp. There he was trained by his Nazi overseers to be a boxer, and he was forced into bouts against his fellow Jewish inmates. Whoever lost was executed. Haft fought 76 times, according to a book written by his son that was based on Haft’s account. Toward the end of World War II, Haft escaped a death march and eventually immigrated to the United States. For a few years, he had a middling career as a boxer under the ring name the “Survivor of Auschwitz.” Levinson, who directed Wag the Dog, Rain Man, The Natural, Diner, and many other movies, has created a stunning piece of work that follows Haft as he deals with trauma and guilt and tries to construct a life in America while searching for his prewar girlfriend, who was also deported to a camp. The camp scenes, shot in black and white, are gruesome and disturbing; the boxing sequences in Jaworzno and in America are brutal. This moving story is tough to watch. Ben Foster puts in an intense and impossible-to-forget performance as Haft—he dropped 60 pounds to film the camp scenes—and the producers have good reason to expect him to collect a series of nominations, if not awards, for this portrayal. That is, if the film ever hits theaters or a streaming service.

As I reported recently, The Survivor was ready for audiences at the start of the 2020, but the pandemic thwarted a theatrical release. And the film, surprisingly, was turned down by the various streaming services. “The streamers told us it doesn’t fit what we’re doing now,” Levinson tells me. “They said, ‘It’s great. It will be nominated. Ben Foster will be nominated. But it doesn’t match our platform.’ It was bizarre.” The movie, though, is having its world premiere this week at the influential Toronto International Film Festival. As someone who has seen it, I find it hard to imagine that The Survivor won’t garner a flood of praise. It is arguably the best Holocaust film since Schindler’s List. A good reception in Toronto would give the film a boost, but that’s no guarantee it will be soon released, given that Hollywood is still trying to figure out what audiences want as the pandemic wanes (in certain parts of the country) and movie watchers return to theaters. So keep a lookout for The Survivor and see it when you can. This film deserves your attention.

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

April 30, 2022: Elon Musk and Twitter—what to worry about; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Russian Nuclear Annihilation Edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™ (an Impossible Burger commercial?); and more

April 26, 2022: Trump’s lust for revenge spreads through the GOP; The Batman mopes; the Peruvian origins of punk rock; and more.

April 23, 2022: Amusing ourselves to autocracy; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Special OAN edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

April 19, 2022: Why the hell isn’t Jared Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi payment a big scandal?; Severance’s wonderful finale; a podcast about the Ukraine war and the US-Russia intelligence wars; and more.

April 5, 2022: The power of the thug; a joke about Trump; Ben Affleck’s moves in Deep Water; and more.

April 2, 2022: How Donald Trump just helped Putin’s barbaric and illegal war; good Trump news; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mike Pence, Lauren Boebert, and Donald Trump Jr.); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 29, 2022: Why you should worry that Ginni Thomas is bonkers; The Adam Project and movie-world time travel; The Sea The Sea, an indie-pop-folk duo, shimmers; and more.

March 26, 2022: Do Joe Biden and the Democrats have a Covid problem?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Special Supreme Court Edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 22, 2022: John le Carré’s farewell gift to us; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Emergency Edition); the former Kremlin official who spoke out; a disappointing Suspicion; “Kyiv Calling”; and more.

March 19, 2022: How Trump and his crew boost Putin’s disinformation; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Candace Owens, Jesse Waters, Lara Logan, Herschel Walker, Elon Musk, and others); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 15, 2022: Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin, and me; why you should watch Severance; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.