CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

It’s the standard red-carpet perp walk, complete with the screams of the paparazzi. In the background, behind the array of starlets, bloggers and 10-minute sensations striking their sexiest pose, you can see some ink-stained wretch in a scratchy rented tuxedo, some glossy television folks – and, occasionally, a high-ranking government official or ambassador looking as if he or she is about to undergo a root canal. Yes, boys and girls, it’s time once again for that annual high school prom known as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube. (I recommend the C-Span version.)

Yeah, I know. I sound like the Church Lady. This will sound even more like sour grapes when I own up to the fact that I have never been invited to a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and there was a time when I would have leaped at the chance. That was followed by a long period when I wasn’t particularly interested, but didn’t begrudge what seemed like an evening of harmless, gossipy fun. No longer. For me, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has become a symbol – one of many – of the vast demographic chasm between the average media consumer and what’s known as the Establishment Media.

I speak as a former daily newspaper reporter, one who has been fully embedded in suburbia for 12 years now. I have lived in or close to the Beltway since 1989. I was a daily newspaper reporter for 19 years, and for seven of those years I worked inside the Beltway for the Washington Post. I left the Post in 1996 and haven’t held a salaried job since (though, believe me, I’ve been working). In that time, my identity has subtly but inexorably morphed from Hardboiled Reporter to Stay-at-Home Mom (albeit one who writes while the kids are in school). I have reached a point in life where I can easily do what used to be almost impossible, which is to see the media from the perspective of my neighbors – most of whom, by the way, long ago quit subscribing to a daily newspaper. 

And yet, as my friend Tom Rosenstiel once said to me, once a journalist, always a journalist. "It’s like the Mafia – you can’t get out,” he said. Which, in a sense, is true; journalism is like the theater in that the smell of greasepaint and the smell of printer’s ink are equally hard to erase. I’m still a working journalist; I feel very invested in the successes and failures of this craft. And so I wince when I see my former colleagues demonstrating how hopelessly out of touch they are with ordinary people – and I’m not talking about New Media vs. Old Media here. I’m talking about social class.

I cringe, for example, when the Post features a “must have” pair of shoes with a $1,000 price tag, or some story about a working woman’s make-over where the tab reaches similarly stratospheric levels. In the world of the Post’s Style section, this is what the average working woman would spend to upgrade her wardrobe. In the world where I live, the average working woman shops at Target. I wince when I tune in to “The Diane Rehm Show” on NPR, and Diane is interviewing yet another personal friend who has written a book and is swapping reminiscences about how far the two of them go back and how many mutual (famous) friends they have. Ack.

The disconnect isn’t always so obvious, but it comes up in all kinds of ways. Like many people, I read the New York Times story about the Bush administration’s system of soliciting former high-ranking military officers as spokesmen, arming them with carefully laundered factoids and sending them out as “unbiased” experts on the war in Iraq. Like many others, I wondered why hadn’t the story hadn’t devoted more space to the way the media gave its unquestioning acceptance to these “unbiased” experts, without ever asking that basic question: Why would he be telling me this? But then I reflected that for most reporters these days, military issues are a topic only slightly less arcane than coal mining. It’s been 35 years since we’ve had an actual citizen army, with military service as the great common denominator among all occupations and demographics. Most reporters these days don’t even have a faint memory of a family member who wore a uniform. That makes reporting on the military the preserve of a tiny cadre of actual experts (all with an extensive list of their own “expert” contacts), with everybody else at the mercy of whichever retired four-star general will return a phone call.

I wince, too, whenever a reporter’s hardships become news – not because they’re not hardships, but because they so often get played as if they were the Stations of the Cross. The New York Times reporter who spent four nights in a fetid jail in Zimbabwe for the crime of disseminating the news – yeah, I was interested in that. I used to work with his wife, and I could imagine what a terrifying ordeal it had been for her. But was four nights in jail worth the front page, with a jump to a double-page spread inside? With pictures? When journalists who live in Zimbabwe, or China, or Iraq routinely face so much worse? And then, pondering that question, I turned the page and found a story about Chicago parents who walk their high school students to school every day because they are afraid their children will be murdered before they get there by random gunfire – a well-founded worry, as it turns out, because since last September, 24 kids in Chicago have died that way. Is it just me, or does it seem to anybody else that those stories could have been switched? Reporting can be a risky job in foreign countries; I certainly never had the guts to do it. But there’s a difference between a news organization that takes its work seriously and one that takes itself seriously … that is, a tad too.

That last part, in fact, may have been the reason the Times got dissed when it decided to boycott this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner on the grounds that the event undermined the credibility of the media. “Funny – I thought Jayson Blair and Judy Miller took care of that,” quipped speaker Craig Ferguson, and he went on to call the Times “sanctimonious, whining jerks.” It wasn’t exactly a bull’s-eye zinger: I’ll grant you the Times can be plenty sanctimonious, but I’ve never met a whiner who worked there. No, the remark was notable mainly because it was exactly what you’d expect from a high school clique intent on asserting its social importance: Don’t turn your backs on us, or we’ll say nasty things about you.

It just so happened that two nights before the Big Prom, I’d gone to see a movie: “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.” (Nice little flick; I recommend it.) The title character is a down-on-her-luck spinster who lives in London on the eve of World War II. Sacked from her governess job for unspecified crimes, destitute and desperate, Miss Pettigrew finagles herself a position as the private social secretary to a ditsy but good-hearted cabaret singer. The film follows her through a 24-hour period in which she gets a front-row view of the love affairs and sexual intrigues of some very fashionable people, all of whom are oblivious to the fact that they are teetering on the brink of a precipice in history. Miss Pettigrew is not oblivious; she’s old enough to remember the last war, in which she lost her fiancé. Watching these frivolous people connive and cheat and discard honest love for the sake of getting their name in lights, she at last bursts out in utter exasperation, “Love is not a game!”

Watching the red-carpet perp walk on YouTube, I could easily picture Miss Pettigrew standing there – a frumpy little nobody in some dress she bought on sale at Filene’s, looking on with a mixture of pity and contempt and rage. Journalism is not a game! she would have said. But Stephen Colbert’s brilliant parody of the media two years ago, when he was the featured speaker, didn’t make a dent in the silliness, so I doubt if Miss Pettigrew would have either. Someday, though, some obscure archivist of the Internet will look at that brief little video and ask, What were they thinking? I hope history provides an answer, because I’ll be damned if I know.