White House Correspondents Association: une histoire

Samedi soir ce sera le traditionnel White House Correspondent's Dinner à Washington. Cette rencontre est organisée par la White House Correspondents Association qui célèbre cette année son centenaire. Ils sont approximativement 250 journalistes à couvrir les activités de la Maison Blanche. Une fois par année on organise un souper auquel le Président et sa conjointe assistent. Voici l'histoire de cette association qui a bien évolué au fil des ans. Je vous laisse plus bas la dernière "performance" d'Obama lors de ce souper.

"Legend has it that reporters first took up a daily beat inside the White House one frigid day in the early 1900s, after President Theodore Roosevelt noticed a band of correspondents staking out sources in the rain. The president "looked out and took pity," as one chronicle of the period reports it.

But historians have since debunked that simple version of events, offering instead a richer tale about how reporters worked their way into the White House and then slowly expanded their presence over the years.

In fact, the rise of the White House beat is "an evolutionary portrait," says Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political scientist on the presidency and the press. She has charted the way the White House press worked its way up from huddling over one small table in the mansion to occupying a full press room in the West Wing.

A press corps of some 250 people now keeps a daily watch on the administration, relying heavily on their proximity to the president and his staff inside the walls of the historic building."

 La suite: