He said he was troubled by Lindsay Lohan attending as a Fox News host's guest. Brokaw says 'no thanks' to WHCD

Tom Brokaw blames it all on Lindsay Lohan.

Last year, Brokaw became one of the biggest critics of the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner after he saw Washington buzzing around and about the troubled Hollywood actress, who was a guest of Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren.


“The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan,” Brokaw told POLITICO during a recent interview in his office in the NBC News Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in New York. “She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break.”

( PHOTOS: Expected guests at White House Correspondents’ Dinner 2013)

The veteran TV newsman’s vocal dissent after the dinner in 2012 was notable for a number of reasons.

First, Brokaw’s industry stature made him the most notable media figure to criticize an annual event so precious to many of his colleagues in the press corps. Second, Brokaw has standing beyond his long tenure as the “Nightly News” anchor — he was once a White House correspondent during the Watergate era. And lastly, his critique was purposeful, public and unpredictable; he made a point to, seemingly out of nowhere, bash the WHCD on “Meet the Press” just one week after the soiree, saying it was “time to rethink” the occasion since it, in his words, “separates the press from the people that they’re supposed to serve, symbolically.”

“One of the reasons that I wanted to raise it on ‘Meet the Press’ — and I told [host] David [Gregory] beforehand, ‘I’m going to look for an opportunity to do that,’ is that we were at a point in Washington where the country had just kind of shut down on what was going on within the Beltway,” Brokaw told POLITICO.

( PHOTOS: Best lines from past White House Correspondents’ Dinners)

“They were making their own decisions in their own states, in their own communities, and the congressional ratings were plummeting,” he added. “The press corps wasn’t doing very well, either. And I thought, ‘This is one of the issues that we have to address. What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country? Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles?’ And what comes through the screen on C-SPAN that night is the latter, and not the former.”

Brokaw’s comments at the time drew both fans and detractors.

Political scientist Larry Sabato tweeted, “Finally, a top media guy speaks out against the WHCA celebrity excess: Tom Brokaw on MTP. Where are the others?” Fox News’s Ed Henry, the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, tweeted that, while he agreed “with Tom Brokaw sometimes the celebrity factor gets too much attention at #whcd — including from me tweeting pics of celebs,” he “wish[ed] Brokaw had noted on @meetthepress #whca is non-profit, dinner raises ton of $ for needy kids & we give over $100k in scholarships.”

( PODCAST: White House Correspondents' Dinner 2013 preview)

Brokaw told POLITICO that the feedback fell largely along generational lines.

“People about my age said, ‘Thank God you finally spoke out on that. We’ve felt that way for some time.’ Others were defensive, including the officers [of the WHCA] about the money they raised for scholarships. Look, I don’t believe in just eating your spinach. I want to have a good time, too. I’ve worked in Washington. I still spend a lot of time down there. I know the value of having a dinner and having a productive social evening with somebody who’s a contact of some kind.”

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“But I think any organization,” he continued, “… has to have a kind of self-policing instinct and what we’re doing with that dinner, as it has been constituted for the past several years, is saying, ‘We’re Versailles. The rest of you eat cake.’”

Henry told POLITICO: “I have looked up to Tom Brokaw my whole life and take his journalism and his thoughts seriously.” Henry also said he is working to improve the image that the dinner projects.

“I have put a lot of energy into making sure as many White House correspondents as possible get invites, instead of celebrities and others. And, as we speak, I am working this very week with Jay Carney’s office on getting young staffers who work with the White House press corps some invites to the dinner,” Henry added. “As for celebrities, last time I checked it’s a free country, so individual news organizations can invite whomever they choose. It’s really not the WHCA’s place to dictate to members of our organization who to invite or who not to invite. But I continue to strongly encourage our members to invite as many journalists and White House aides to the dinner as possible because these are the people who deserve to be in the room for what is a very fun night.”

Brokaw stopped attending the WHCD years ago and says he won’t be there this year. “I would watch on C-SPAN, and as I watched on C-SPAN, I would try to put myself, kind of, if you will, in the person of an interested citizen in Kansas City, or in Little Rock, or in Spokane, Wash., saying, ‘That’s the Washington press corps?’ I mean, there was more dignity at my daughter’s junior prom than there is [at] what I’m seeing on C-SPAN there,” he said.

Despite his criticism, Brokaw doesn’t see himself as a never-say-die scold about the affair.

“This is not a crusade on my part. I’ve had my say. This is what I believe,” he said. “I think I still have some standing in the Washington press corps, having spent as much time there as I did, as I continue to, so it’s really up to the organizations and this generation of correspondents in Washington to make the determination for themselves. I’m not going to stay on their back about it. What I would do is take a hard look at it and find ways to temper the more outrageous qualities of it. Why do we think to have a successful evening, you have to have Donald Trump as your guest of honor, for example, or Lindsay Lohan?”

And it’s not as if Brokaw wants celebrities gone altogether. He recalls receiving a picture from CBS News’s Bob Schieffer last year of the newsman posing next to “Homeland” star Claire Danes. Along with the photo was a note: “Sorry, Brokaw, I’m not giving this up.”

“I get that,” Brokaw said. “Claire Danes is not someone I’m talking about. She’s a big deal. And you can bring in George Clooney, he loves to come there. He’s a serious guy in Hollywood. But it’s gone down-market, in my judgment, in too many ways.”