hey, guess what! turns out, michelle wolf is a woman!

[misanthrope]

113. Your last statement about the WH Press Corps has been salient for a few decades now

There's a good scene in the 1990s feature film "The Paper" where Robert Duvall plays a salty old editor talking to a younger colleague. He's talking about being with a group of foreign correspondents years past who got metaphorically drunk on their proximity to the more famous and powerful folks they were supposed to be covering.

They head to the most expensive restaurant in Grenoble, France to celebrate on their respective companies' expense accounts. Then a $9,000 check is placed by the waiter. They panic and are scrambling trying to scrape it together, possibly going to Western Union to get money cabled.

"Just when it was getting really embarrassing, this funny looking little old guy calls the maitre'd over," Duvall's character said. "He draws a couple of squiggly lines on a napkin, signed his name, winked at us and that was that. The old guy was Pablo Picasso and that napkin paid our bill."

"I'm not sure I caught the segue way," the younger colleague said.

"Well, the people we cover, we move in their world but it is their world. You can't live like that. You'll never keep up," Duvall replied. "If you try to make this job about the money, you'll be miserable because we don't get the money. Never have, never will."

WH correspondents make more money than some guy at a local paper covering city hall but they're susceptible to the same pitfalls. Powerful people get to know them by name as do people on the street. They think there's more to it than there is.

Both of those groups know those journalists because they want something from them. People on the street want information. Politicos want complicity and p.r.

It's not about the reporter. They're just in the flow of needs and after them, it will be someone else. But their responsibility is to the people, not the powerful.