Can the White House Correspondents’ Dinner “Spread the Gospel of the Fourth


A typical day for Tamara Keith involves shouting at the president of the United States. But when the NPR White House correspondent isn’t wearing out her vocal cords on the South Lawn, trying to get Joe Biden to comment on the news of the day, she has a somewhat more glamorous assignment: organizing Washington’s glitziest, and perhaps most controversial, dinner of the year. Critics have long decried the so-called Nerd Prom, given perceptions of coziness between journalists dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns mingling with politicians they cover, a dynamic that led The New York Times, for one, to sit out the annual soiree. 

Keith, who serves as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, acknowledges that most people tune in for the red-carpet celebrity spotting and the evening’s entertainment. On that front, I can report that comedian and Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. will be this year’s entertainer. 

Still, Keith says she hopes to use this year’s gathering as “an opportunity to spread the gospel of the fourth estate.” The dinner returned last year after being scrapped in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID, and having been seemingly diminished during the presidency of Donald Trump, who refused to attend while in office and, in 2019, directed his staff to snub as well. As one attendee told me after last year’s dinner, “It wasn’t quite the full-on celebrity bash that it was during the Obama years, but the mood was much lighter than during Trump’s term.”

Part of the dinner’s appeal for journalists is the social aspect; Keith mentions she wants her dress to be an homage to Holly Hunter’s in Broadcast News. But the event, which will be held on April 29 at the Washington Hilton, also serves as the WHCA’s only major fundraiser, helping to support the organization’s scholarship program, according to Keith, and can raise awareness for the profession. “We exist in a time where there often isn’t a shared set of facts. So can our dinner solve all of democracy’s problems and fix people’s distrust in institutions? No,” she says. “But we can at least try to highlight the good work of journalists and explain why we do what we do.”

The seeds of Keith’s path to NPR’s White House team were planted in childhood. She first encountered NPR through its member station KCRW, which she’d listen to during long drives to and from auditions as a “really not good child actor and model” in California, she says. As a teenager, she wrote letters to NPR journalists asking for advice—Cokie Roberts, Liane Hansen—and was invited to be a teen essayist for NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. “This was the first tiny venture into getting someone younger on the radio,” Keith says. 

Before joining NPR in 2009 as a temporary business reporter, Keith worked at a variety of member stations, opening the Sacramento bureau of KPCC—where she covered Arnold Schwarzenegger (“good fun”)—and the Fresno bureau for KQED, where she began as an intern on their statewide radio news program The California Report. “There have been several points in my career where I was like, Yes, I will wake up…



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