Well aren't I just giddy with delight?

It appears I have unwittingly stumbled into the topic that is the center of the blogosphere! (Just for the record, why isn't it a "blogsphere?")

Ah yes, the Stephen Colbert performance at the White House correspondents dinner. I thought it was hysterical and I admired him for going on with gusto when the crowd reacted like they were watching their 88 year old grandmother do a striptease. Did they deserve the digs? Most definitely! They've been acting like a bunch of trained carrier pigeons since the beginning of 2002 ~ it took Katrina(!!!!) to remind them that they actually don't report to the administration and they don't have to deliver the story handed to them or strapped to their leg, if we want to stay with my metaphor.

Loved the fact that he said that the administration was rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenberg, not the Titanic. (Especially given the fact that one was destined to for destruction and the other just had some bad luck. I mean, come on, who really thought it was a good idea to place diesel burning engines in close proximity to 200,000 cubic meters of highly flammable hydrogen??? They even had a smoking room, for god's sake!! And don't even get me started on the karma issues involved with it being a Nazi vehicle...)

But back to the humorless press corps... I did my time inside the beltway. Back in the days when I was young and innocent ~ well, not as young and innocent as when I was a Republican and worked for the local party on the election (but that was 1984 and I wasn't old enough to vote, so I couldn't do real damage). Anyway, right after I graduated from college, I went to work for a media relations firm. Now there are several losses of innocence that one experiences in their life, the worst for me was finding out my "pet" frogs were cannibals, but working inside the beltway was another lesser loss of innocence. My first day on the job, as I was being oriented to the computer system and the very important method of billing clients for our time, the president came into the office to talk with account executive working with me. He said it was time to release the research. I was sent off to work on something else while my coworker prepped a package to send over to the Post. The next day a story appeared on the back page of the front page section of the Washington Post. The story detailed the study and mentioned how it had been "leaked" to Post reporters. Leaked. Yeah, by press release with a fax machine!! That was the day I stopped believing in investigative journalism. After two years of "face time," corporate culture where what you could take credit mattered more than what you actually did, the realization that it truly was a rat race (And everyone knows that the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat)and happy hours where everyone drank Amstel Light, I was fully jaded and got the heck out of there. There was something very Stepford-esque about the Amstel Light and I'm still a little creeped out by people who drink it.

Maybe journalists and their editors, publisher and broadcasters have been frightened by the power of corporations after the experience of 60 Minutes and Jeffrey Wigand or maybe that fact that most media outlets are owned by large conglomerate corporations control the news. Either way, one can't help but think that "news" is nothing more that what is handed out in press packets or provided in press conferences. Sure the local folks are listening to the scanners -- it still leads if it bleeds! But the only folks that seem to be working for their material are the stalkerazzi. Maybe that's why we're so obsessed with celebrity news? We can recognize that it's the only real news not being served up to media on a platter. After all, who are you more likely to track down an anonymous source for? Whether Dick Cheney actually requested that Scooter Libby leak the name of Joe Wilson's wife (and you can bet there was a media list involved!!) or the inside story on how Katie Holmes' family really feels about Tom Cruise and Scientology?