The annual White House Correspondents' Dinner was held in Washington this past weekend. The dinner awards some prizes and serves as an excuse for the corporations that own media companies to reward rich friends and B-list celebrities with seats at tables that are often within 100 feet of the President himself. Then a comedian does a little routine. This year's comedian was late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson. He was ok.


Not the awkward disaster of Stephen Colbert's too-mean performance nor the intriguingly terrible anachronistic trainwreck of Rich Little's live death of last year. Ferguson's not a political comedian, or an attempted satirist, and he didn't do a political routine. He did, in a little reversal, spend most of his routine bashing the newsmedia. They eat that shit up.

Ferguson first mocked employees of the beleaguered LA Times, but he reserved his most stringent material for the New York Times, who this year decided, a number of years too late, that the schmoozy dinner looks a little improper to folks not in tune with the friendly DC scene, in which the media and the government largely consider themselves to be equals in importance and power. So the Times didn't buy a table. And Ferguson told them all to go to hell. And the crowd applauded.

(You can watch the entire dinner here if you're a masochist or just incredibly bored.)