After last year’s White House Correspondent Dinner, world-renown journalist Tom Brokaw denounced the event for all of the actors and other celebrities that attended—especially Lindsay Lohan.
This year he’ll forego attending the dinner, according to a recent interview with POLITICO.com.
“The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan,” he said concerning his bashing of the WHCD. “She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break.”
Brokaw disagrees with the dinner for many reasons and says it was “time to rethink” the event because it “separates the press from the people that they’re supposed to serve, symbolically.”
He also doesn't like the way the dinner is progressing. During an interview with David Gregory on "Meet the Press", the veteran journalist spoke about the decline of the integrity.
“One of the reasons that I wanted to raise it on ‘Meet the Press’ — and I told [host] David [Gregory] beforehand, ‘I’m going to look for an opportunity to do that,’ is that we were at a point in Washington where the country had just kind of shut down on what was going on within the Beltway,” he said in the interview with Politico.
“They were making their own decisions in their own states, in their own communities, and the congressional ratings were plummeting,” he said. “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 the screen on C-SPAN that night is the latter, and not the former.”
Read the full interview here. A full list of all the big names attending the dinner can be seen here.
