The Weekly Winston: Correspondents Dinner Edition

There’s likely an inverse relationship between the decline of the legacy media and the increasingly over-the-top desperation, self-congratulation and spectacle of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, held last night.  You would think the media would do themselves a favor and not televise the proceedings of their Otherness on C-SPAN, just as the Gridiron dinner is not open to cameras.  Even Tom Brokaw has had enough; isn’t this almost a “Cronkite Moment” for the major media?  (Though memo to Tom: Lindsay Lohan isn’t the real problem here.  Looked in a mirror lately?)

Anyway, it put me in a frame of mind to recall on of Churchill’s famous dismissals of newspapers from 1929:

Fancy cutting down those beautiful trees we saw this afternoon to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilization.

Wonder what he might say about Twitter.  Perhaps something like, “Fancy compressing your thoughts into 140 characters, and calling it ‘communication.’”

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