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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 5/2/2006 9:59:31 AM
Title: "Shameless red-carpet parade"
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From MIKE PETERSON: I am neither of a mindset nor of a generation to attack the MSM as if they were some great unilateral conspiracy. That said, the reaction -- and lack of reaction -- to Steven Colbert's routine at the White House Correspondents Association dinner is dismaying to me for the most part because I could see it coming from the start. Three minutes into his act, I knew he was right on, and not gonna get covered.

The reaction, at the moment and in the coverage that followed, was "Stevie is a bad boy. He's not cool. He's not one of us."

The very fact that anyone could be "one of us" or "not one of us" is exactly what's wrong with coverage of Washington these days.

Thanks to C-SPAN, I got to watch those primping, self-satisfied marionettes on the red carpet, coming in wearing their designer clothes, accompanied by their hand-selected oh-so-ironic celebrity guests, and I wondered how they could be in any sense related to the poor underpaid reporters I know at small, local papers who agonize over whether they should accept a free golf cap at the opening of the new mall.

Look, I understand that, when your face is on national TV every day, people will recognize you and will assume that they know you. It's hard to avoid the trap of thinking you are somebody.

But the shameless red-carpet parade that night made it clear: We've established what you are. Now we're just haggling over the price.

And as Colbert's routine wound out, and the crowd greeted it with rote chuckles and genuine discomfort, I knew that he was messing up, man -- he was blowing his coolness in front of the whole prom court.

What he said was funny, but nobody laughed. And it brought to mind the closing lines of a book written by a journalist who never by-god wore a tux and puffed himself up on camera:

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which
was which." [Permalink]

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