Media: the Soiree is the Message

Well, look at that! Mainstream media icon takes a poke at his own kind.

Last year, veteran TV newsman Tom Brokaw bashed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on “Meet the Press.” Just one week after the soiree, Brokaw said it was “time to rethink” the occasion since it “separates the press from the people that they’re supposed to serve.”

Brokaw hasn’t changed his mind, and won’t be attending this year’s affair either. The retired NBC anchor recently explained to “Politico” he raised the lavish affair’s inappropriateness on “Meet the Press” because:

we were at a point in Washington where the country had just kind of shut down on what was going on within the Beltway. [Folks] were making their own decisions in their own states, in their own communities, and the congressional ratings were plummeting. The press corps wasn’t doing very well, either. And I thought, “This is one of the issues that we have to address. What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country? Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles?” And what comes through [on] that night is the latter. . . that dinner, as it has been constituted for the past several years, is saying, “We’re Versailles. The rest of you eat cake.”

Of course, it’s not just the press corps’ soiree that evokes pre-revolutionary France. As we have noted, wealth is concentrating ever more greatly in the green suburbs of our nation’s capital, while America’s economic problems fade ever more from our national elite’s view.