New White House Correspondents' Site Offers Dinner Clips

By: Joe Strupp Do you want to relive Stephen Colbert's controversial White House Correspondents Association dinner appearance from 2006? Rich Little's forgettable bomb from 2007? Or even Al Franken's pair of routines from the 1990s?

They are all there on the new WHCA Web site, which debuts today with links to those clips and others dating back to 1993, as well as photos, a history of the journalists' group, and its scholarships. The WHCA has even linked to a handful of blogs by White House reporters, from the Chicago Tribune to the Houston Chronicle.

"It really spiffs up what was there before," says Ann Compton, WHCA president. The site had in the past been a limited space overseen by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. At the request of former WHCA President Steve Scully, the organization gave it a facelift and brought in a professional Web producer.

Now the site, at www.whca.net, will be used as more of an informational and historic resource, Compton says. "We hope to get a lot of traffic for the site."

A key attraction is expected to be the WHCA dinner clips, which have become more in demand as the dinner has drawn more interest each year for its celebrity guests and, more often than not, controversial moments.

Compton said C-SPAN, which broadcasts the dinner each year, organized a special online file for the Web site to link, giving Web users access to all dinners back nearly 15 years. Online users can see Aretha Franklin's 1999 performance, Elayne Boosler joking about the tailhook scandal in 1993 and Jay Leno in 2000 telling President Clinton, "no one is sadder that you are leaving that I am. You bought my house, you bought my car."

C-SPAN is also offering Web users a chance to purchase DVD or VHS copies of the dinners for $24.95, according to Compton. But she said the sales are strictly a commercial enterprise of C-SPAN, not a WHCA fundraiser, not even for use with the WHCA annual scholarships.

"We are not a business, we don?t want to get into a business," Compton said. "We do not want to make the dinner a commercial entity." She said the Bravo channel approached the WHCA about two years ago offering to pay $50,000 for the exclusive rights to the dinner and a plan to record it and broadcast it a day later.

Compton said association members would not even meet with the cable channel. "We do not want to sell the dinner or the president," she said. "Right now, C-SPAN runs it live and anyone can watch it and tape it."

Besides, Compton said the scholarship fund, for which the dinner is held, does not need additional support at the moment. With the event becoming more and more popular, the $25,000 in annual scholarships now given are expected to quadruple to $100,000 for the 2008 dinner.

The Web site also includes a history page with past photos and information about the dinner, first held in 1920. Compton said the association recently came across a 1944 AP story on that year's dinner that had been saved by the mother of legendary White House reporter Merriman Smith, the president of the WHCA that year.

Compton said Smith's son had found the story after his death and passed it on to the association, which posted it on the site. The story details the guest list than included President Franklin Roosevelt and House Speaker Sam Rayburn. The entertainment ranged form Bob Hope to Singer Robert Merrill and a 40-piece orchestra. "The dinner probably lasted for four days," Compton joked about the list of entertainers.

Turning to the upcoming dinner, slated for April 26, 2008, Compton was mum about her likely entertainment choice, but said "it will be different," when asked how she would follow the likes of Colbert and Little. She said she had already begun the search process and contacted several potential acts, adding, "you have to work a year in advance."