Have the Washington media harnessed themselves too closely to President George W. Bush? This odd coupling appears to have taken a tethered skydive out of the plane flown by comedian Stephen Colbert at the recent White House Correspondents Dinner.

The Comedy Central host of "The Colbert Report" was the featured entertainer at the Washington affair where some 1,200 journalists share a Saturday evening in an airplane hangar of a ballroom on a "date," not with a significant other, but with a news source.

Cloistered justices of the Supreme Court have been known to attend this journalists' soiree, along with ambassadors, spies, industrialists, cabinet members, admirals, high clergy, major generals and members of Congress, along with their lobbyists. In recent years this gathering has been salted with Hollywood actors, marquee athletes and celebrities of all stripes.

The sitting U.S. president and the first lady always attend this annual spring ritual so that the moved and shaken of the media can preen before the truly powerful. After being shot on March 30, 1981, a recuperating Ronald Reagan telephoned in his regrets to the dinner. This likely marked an uptick in Reagan's press coverage.

No one remembers a single line from the comedian who performed at the '81 dinner. But this year Stephen Colbert shattered the tradition of comedic politeness. I attended the '81 dinner of the Washington elite and was stunned by its lily whiteness. Among the 2,400 power-diners, there were eight African-Americans, including the Newsday national editor from New York, the perennial Vernon Jordan and, God only knows why, boxer Floyd Patterson. Perhaps I should state here that I did not attend this year's dinner.

The Colbert transcript/C-Span performance is a side-splitter. Instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, he has this "soaring" Bush White House rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg. The humor, however, collapsed like the dirigible on the live dinner audience. Here, I must part company with my colleagues, some of whom went petty. One D.C. columnist nailed Colbert for a mixed metaphor. The performance before the president was hilarious. It was also courageous. Sadly, I'm moved to hazard a guess as to why the attending journalists did not dare permit themselves to laugh at Colbert in public.

First, let's stipulate that the Republicans at the dinner did not laugh because they were the butts of the jokes. Colbert, for example, suggested in a nod to the vice president, "Someone shoot me in the face." He steamrolled the Bush administration, letting up occasionally with a touch of dead-on, comedic irony: "If anybody needs anything else at their tables, speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Somebody from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail."

Next, we have to accept that Colbert, as with his Comedy Central cohort Jon Stewart, has become something of a rival to television newscasters. A growing number of young Americans - for worse, not better, granted - depend on this duo for their news. In pursuit of this audience, politicians and other newsmakers hold their noses and submit to guest appearances on Colbert's show. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, said he preferred appearing on the Comedy Central shows because the mainstream news media simply run handouts from the Bush White House these days.

Colbert leveled Ellsberg's charge directly at Fox News at the dinner and slyly praised press coverage of "NSA wiretapping [and] secret U.S. prisons in Eastern Europe." Then, in a venomous attack on the media, Colbert dismissed them as mere stenographers who take down fiction from the president and pass it off as facts.

Colbert was no laughing matter to the Washington press corps. In a delicious touch of irony, he later said on his TV show that the adoring Washington audience "practically carried me out on their shoulders, even though I wasn't ready to go." During the evening of frivolity, Colbert's biting wit lanced the illicit relationship between the media and those they are charged to cover.

Bush has sunk beneath the possibility of satire; the media must be careful not to stumble beyond the reach of irony.

© 2006 Newsday

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