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As you may have heard, the New York Times has decided to stop participating in the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. (The news was buried in the 13th paragraph of Sunday's Frank Rich column.)

There has been much debate about the dinner over the years, with many outside the media establishment citing it as evidence of a too-cozy relationship between the media and the administration.

While one can certainly make the argument that the media need a more adversarial relationship with the government, I've come to question the significance of the dinner in making that case. One night of revelry, after all, does not constitute a compromised relationship. One can certainly argue that the dinner is a symptom of larger problems. But reporters need to have a civil relationship with those they cover, and for all involved to have a night out just doesn't strike me as that big of a deal.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of the dinner – I certainly wouldn't want to have to suffer through the hobnobbing and awkward speeches that mark the event. It's just that it strikes me as far less significant in the grand scheme of things than some people seem to think.

Stephen Spruiell calls the Times' decision "a very dumb overreaction to a perceived coziness between Washington reporters and their sources." He continues:

Are NYT reporters henceforth barred from attending any party or social function at which government officials are present, for fear that liberal bloggers might accuse them of being lapdogs again? By implying that there's something improper about such hobnobbing, the Times brass is setting its D.C. reporters up for all sorts of accusations, should they, God forbid, get caught having a drink with a friend who works for the government.

Spruiell seizes on something here: The Times decision seems to be grounded at least as much in public relations as it is in journalism. It's not, apparently, that the dinner is the problem; it's the perception of it that's the problem.

This comment by Los Angeles Times D.C. Bureau Chief Doyle McManus pretty much sums it up. Events like the dinner are "largely useless and largely harmless....There is a valid concern about coziness in Washington, but the test of coziness is in the coverage," he told Editor & Publisher. "I have seen no evidence that these rather dreadful events are affecting coverage."

Check out this "Notebook" from Katie Couric. We're with you, Katie. And so are these people. Now let's just hope the right folks are listening…

It’s a lament we’ve heard many times before, but it's one worth repeating. Veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent Pamela Constable sounds off today about the increasing lack of investment by news organizations on foreign news reporting.

The high cost of maintaining foreign bureaus has led to industry-wide cutbacks that have become more pronounced as new forms of media have eaten away at newspaper and network profits. Last month’s announcement by the Boston Globe that it was closing down its last three foreign bureaus is Constable’s jumping-off point – she notes that there are only four U.S. newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and The Post) that “still keep a stable of foreign correspondents.”

As for television news, the record isn’t much better, she writes. “In the 1980s, American TV networks each maintained about 15 foreign bureaus; today they have six or fewer.”

The sad irony in this landscape is one that Constable isn’t the first to highlight: “Americans' need to understand the struggles of distant peoples is greater than ever.”

Rich Little will be speaking at the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 21, and he has promised not to be too hard on President Bush, unlike last year's speaker, Stephen Colbert.

"I won't even mention the word 'Iraq,'" Little told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He also said this: "They don't want anyone knocking the president. He's really over the coals right now, and he's worried about his legacy."

Colbert-loving commentators have gotten worked up over the selection of Little, an impersonator who clearly won't be delivering anything like Colbert's searing satire from last year, a speech that delighted some but struck others as inappropriate.

Here's the thing, though: Complaining about the speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner is sort of like complaining that your new insect overlords aren't offering much of a health care plan. That is, it's missing the point. The issue isn't who speaks at the dinner so much as the dinner itself, which has outlived any usefulness it might once have had.

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For some reporters, the White House Correspondents Dinner is more than just another night at the prom. For CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, it turned out to be a working dinner – one in which she gained a piece of information from a fellow attendee that ended up having quite the effect on markets (as Fed chairmen’s remarks so often do). From the Financial Times (via TVNewser):

Stocks fell on Monday after CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo revealed on air that Ben Bernanke felt his testimony last week had been “misunderstood.”

The anchor said Mr Bernanke had told her at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington on Saturday that he had not intended the markets to infer that the Fed was nearly done raising interest rates.

“I asked him whether the markets got it right after his congressional testimony and he said, flatly, no,” Ms Bartiromo said. She was reporting live from floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the resulting trading roar almost drowned out the rest of her remarks.

FT procured one market strategist to interpret the situation. Said Alan Ruskin, a strategist at RBC Greenwich Capital: “It comes off as a great example of over-communication and a possible attempt to over-fine-tune, assuming he was willing to go on the record with these comments - CNBC is not the Fed’s obvious port of call to correct market expectations.”

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In the aftermath of the White House pressroom drama that saw press secretary Scott McClellan and reporters re-enacting scenes from grade school playgrounds of their pasts, there has been a lot of talk about the relationship between the media and the administration. Even before this latest incident over Vice President Cheney’s accidental shooting, former White House press secretary Mike McCurry was publicly questioning the value of televising the daily briefing (even though it was he who instituted that practice).

Covering the White House has to be one of the more frustrating jobs for a reporter because, let’s face it, information doesn’t exactly flood out of any administration and it barely trickles out of the current one. The gig ensures plenty of air-time and bylines but most often, it’s more a chronicle of events than anything else. Still, this morning’s Katharine Seelye article in The New York Times offers up one of the more, um, unique explanations of why the press briefings sometimes become so confrontational:

Renana Brooks, a clinical psychologist practicing in Washington who said she had counseled several White House correspondents, said the last few years had given rise to "White House reporter syndrome," in which competitive high achievers feel restricted and controlled and become emotionally isolated from others who are not steeped in the same experience.

She said the syndrome was evident in the Cheney case, which she described as an inconsequential event that produced an outsize feeding frenzy. She said some reporters used the occasion to compensate for not having pressed harder before the Iraq war.

"It's like any post-traumatic stress," she said, "like when someone dies and you think you could have saved them."

“White House reporter syndrome?” The doctor is in.

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