Schmoozing With the Stars   

Don Imus put the spotlight on Washington's celebrity journalist dinners--glitzy events where journalists mingle with top government officials and Hollywood stars. Are they a symbol of an elite press corps out of touch with its audience or just fun-filled nights on the town?

PRODUCER KEENAN BLOCK WAS GOING TO do a live interview with then-House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt for "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" when he got an urgent call from his boss. It seems nobody at the program had invited a big name to sit at their table at the annual Radio-Television Correspondents Association dinner.

"Ask Gephardt if he'll be our guest," Dan Werner told Block. The producer did and the Missouri Democrat accepted on the spot. Everyone was happy, except for the congressman's press secretary.

"She went ballistic," recalls Block. "She told me she had a stack of people who'd already invited Gephardt, and they were still trying to sort out who to go with." A week later Gephardt's press secretary called and politely declined. "Even though Gephardt said it was fine, his press secretary was obviously interested in seeing her boss sit at a table that would bring in more chits," says Block, now working with MSNBC, the new Microsoft-NBC 24-hour cable news and interactive venture.

Clearly, MacNeil-Lehrer had fallen down on the job. Lining up an impressive "get" for any of the glitzy annual black-tie media bashes is like inviting the most popular girl to the senior prom--you must ask early and, in some cases, often. Paul Magnusson, a Business Week reporter, invited Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to the White House Correspondents Association dinner in December. The secretary kept Magnusson on pins and needles until two weeks before the May event, when he finally bowed out.

Such is the pressure on politicians, reporters and, more recently, Hollywood stars when it comes to who escorts whom to any of the self-congratulatory Washington press dinners. Ever since journalist Michael Kelly invited Oliver North's paper-shredding friend Fawn Hall to be his date for the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 1987, the stakes have escalated at the press dinners, where reporters and big-name politicians call a truce for one night and snuggle up.

No longer are the two best-attended functions--the White House Correspondents and the Radio-Television Correspondents dinners--humdrum, sleep-inducing affairs. With the likes of Kevin Costner and Barbra Streisand, not to mention Kato Kaelin, Anthony Hopkins and Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson, pulling up in stretch limos, Washington press dinners have become places to see and be seen.

"In one room, you look around and gosh, there's Tom Brokaw," says Block, the outgoing president of the Radio-Television Correspondents Association, who organized this year's event. "There's Secretary of Defense William Perry. There's Newt Gingrich. There's Larry King. There's the First Lady. Dan Rather. Holy shit. Wow, that's kind of cool. Here's a night where we can rub shoulders with these people and feel important. It can be a little phony."

Say what you will about Washington press dinners--there are six major annual galas at which journalists host the party and have a chance to suck up to sources, gawk at starlets or schmooze with politicians--but they are clearly an institution in a city full of institutions. With the social season kicking off in January and lasting until May, journalists can pencil in at least one formal, $100-plus dinner for each month.

In March the spotlight focused on the Washington dinner circuit when radio shock jock Don Imus, a paid speaker, trashed President Clinton while he and the First Lady sat stone-faced at the head table as guests of honor of the Radio-Television Correspondents Association. Most attendees cringed.

The ill-fated event, like many of the dinners, was telecast uncensored and unfiltered on C-SPAN. The heightened national exposure has triggered criticism of the galas, which seem to accentuate the coziness of journalists with the people they cover.

"The thing that got me going was watching Imus on C-SPAN," says Don Campbell, a longtime Washington journalist who attended more than 30 press dinners during his tenure in D.C. "When you get out of Washington you get a totally different perspective," continues Campbell, who now lives in Oregon. "Here was the president of the United States sitting there being insulted and his wife being insulted and taking it instead of getting up and giving Imus the finger. And then you had all these journalist stars trying to sit there grinning. This is one more example of what's wrong with the journalist culture in Washington."

To some, the dinners are yet another example of how removed Washington journalists are from the rest of the country. Along with gossipy tidbits about big-foot journalists yucking it up with big-name politicians at tennis tournaments, and celebrity journalists raking in big bucks on the lecture circuit, and Washington pundits making news rather than reporting it, these dinners reinforce the glamorous, incestuous, insular images many Americans have of Washington journalists. It sometimes seems as if the capital press corps has become just like the power structure it is supposed to monitor. It's not the journalists in the hinterlands that are damaging the profession, say many, it's the Washington stars.

When James Warren came to Washington in 1993 as the Chicago Tribune's bureau chief vowing to steer clear of the capital's insider trappings, he singled out one of the city's most prestigious celebrity journalist events to emphasize his point. He said he didn't plan to be part of the Gridiron Club, "prancing around on stage, singing to the president or whatever the fuck they do."

But some of those who attend the banquets advise critics to relax.

"These dinners are harmless," says Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas. "It's taking them much too seriously to say there's anything wrong with them. It's much ado about nothing. It's a harmless evening of standing around and gawking and gossiping."

New York Times Washington Editor Andrew Rosenthal says he dreads going to the dinners before the fact but sometimes winds up having a good time. "There are two levels of pomposity in Washington," he says. "One is to think these dinners are really important. The other is to trash them."

SO ARE THESE SOIREES SIMPLY A NIGHT out where reporters and sources can enjoy themselves and gossip off the record? Some believe they are not so innocuous. They say the sight of journalists shamelessly cuddling up to the rich, famous and powerful is not a pretty one.

"I personally think there's a lot of conflict that reporters have about going," says Roxanne Roberts, who attends and often covers the dinners for the Washington Post. "There's something slightly unseemly. No reporter truly believes they can be compromised by sitting next to a source and buying their ticket. Yet there's the perception that it's not really OK."

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek has similar feelings of discomfort. "It does compromise you a bit," says Isikoff, who attended the White House Correspondents Association gala this year with Michael Chertoff, counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee. "I felt a little uneasy inviting people."

Don Campbell, who will begin teaching journalism at the University of Oregon in the fall, goes a step further. "I don't think these dinners are a good thing," says Campbell, who worked for Gannett News Service during his Washington reporting days. "They distort what the function of reporting in Washington should be. You should not spend any of your time thinking of how you should suck up to a member of the Supreme Court, committee chairman or television actor to get them to sit at your table."

Charles Peters, editor in chief of The Washington Monthly, believes the process of inviting guests is corrupting for journalists. "The terrible thing is what the reporters do in order to get big shots for their table, particularly those with out-of-town bosses," he says. "The reporter gets desperate to get stars to impress their boss. Nobody who has any intelligence can doubt the reporter is compromised in that desperation. He makes an implied promise to be nice in print to the guy he gets to come."

But really all these dinners are, say many who attend regularly, are a chance to put away notebooks and chat up sources and colleagues you seldom have time to see. Often it's an opportunity to meet in person the source you know well over the phone. Or to put a face behind your name and newspaper so the next time you call Secretary Reich or Attorney General Janet Reno, they might remember you.

George E. Condon of Copley News Service says he finds the dinners valuable "because everybody's there. You can talk to Cabinet members you couldn't get on the phone or top aides to the president."

"I see no harm in them...," says the Brookings Institution's Stephen Hess, a longtime student of Washington journalism. "OK, they weren't designed for the general public to tune in on C-SPAN. But they are really just like the Rotary dinners or giving out awards at the PTA.... Every professional organization has something like them."

Perhaps the defining image of the receptions that surround the dinners is of someone making small talk while furtively scanning the room looking for someone more important.

"I've come to realize what they are is throwing a bone to the little people," Block says. "The people who get a kick out of it are those who will never be invited to a White House state dinner--the people who aren't on the A-list with Cokie Roberts and Jim Lehrer. Here's a night when we can rub shoulders with these people and feel we are important."