White House correspondents' dinner: where have all the A-listers gone?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/25/white-house-correspondents-dinner-celebrities

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Zip through the guest list of this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner – the annual, awkward bear hug between the president and the press, which takes place on Saturday night – and you might find yourself wistful for the time President Barack Obama threatened to drone strike the Jonas Brothers.

(Trivia: the other famous presidential black-tie joke about carelessly dealing death, George W Bush’s 2004 gag about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was at the Radio-TV Correspondents’ Association dinner, a competing event.)

Wistful, because the attendance at the 2010 event by all three Jonas Brothers, then near the height of their powers, was a signal that politics had gone wonderfully pop. Democracy, an invitation to the masses to participate in their own governance, desires mass appeal. In this sense, 2010 was a historic smash. Kim Kardashian was also there that year, as was Justin Bieber.

Five years later, the quality of celebrity is showing signs of strain. Gone from the event, which has been running since 1920, are Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis (class of 2011) and George Clooney (2012). The Huffington Post is bringing a “Snapchat star”. MSNBC is bringing the people it puts on TV every day. Instead of Kim Kardashian, Fox News has invited Brody Jenner, one of the minor satellites orbiting Kim’s star. Donald Trump is coming.

Is Washington falling off the red carpet circuit? Some of the news outlets hosting tables in 2015 appear not even to be trying. The Washington Post, for example, has not invited a single guest identifiable as a celebrity, unless you count secretary of labor Tom Perez. Atlantic Media has made the rather literal decision to host Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, and her husband Cass Sunstein, a scholar and former administration official. The couple does have a star quality, and would have been solid invites to the event in any year, pre-Jonas. But this is 2015.

A hat must be tipped to Time magazine, which in one man has doubled the wattage of the night’s event while sustaining its leitmotif of targeted assassination. Time has invited Bradley Cooper, the star of American Sniper, the story of Iraq War veteran Chris Kyle and the top-grossing film of 2014.

Related: Bush jokes about search for WMD, but it's no laughing matter for critics

There are moralistic scolds who say the celebrity presence is an embarrassment and sign of all that is wrong with the correspondent’s dinner, which is supposed to promote the honorable work of adversarial journalism by raising money for journalism scholarships. For this set, the buzz that surrounds the event and the week of receptions that now attend it detract from its otherwise serious purpose.

We must be suspicious of a certain snobbery in these people. They are the kind to fawn over Diana Trilling’s description of her trip to the Kennedy White House, in which her husband, Lionel, the literary critic, drank six martinis and ended up knee-to-knee with JFK talking about whether Women in Love or The Rainbow was the greater DH Lawrence novel.

Yet they have a problem with the singer Ciara and her date, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, sitting in a room with the president, ice skater Tara Lipinski and Billy Eichner from Funny or Die.

Eichner could raise the bar for taste. The White House correspondents’ association annual dinner has seen more than one joke about how funny it can be to kill. Funny or Die tops that.