Washington, D.C. — Every year, the White House holds a White House Correspondents Dinner. It invites the press and a broad sampling of celebrities to enjoy a glamorous, black-tie party where the president performs a stand-up comedy routine. It is an opportunity for people to pretend that the American head of state is not guilty of a wide variety of high-level crimes.
While this year’s dinner was no different, President Barack Obama employed a special form of comedy. He was aided by comedian Keegan Michael Key of Comedy Central’s “Key & Peele.” Playing a character named Luther, Key acted as Obama’s “anger translator.” He took Obama’s “politically correct” statements and translated them to tell the press how the president really feels.
In the segment, which has gone viral on the Internet, one of his first jokes was about the media. Obama said of the press,
…despite our differences, we count on the press to shed light on the most important issues of the day.
Luther “translated” this into an accurate joke about Fox News fear-mongering (“And we can count on Fox News to terrify old white people with some nonsense!…”).
While Fox News is an atrocious organization, Obama’s initial statement is as misleading as Key’s was true. Obama has spent his presidencysuppressing freedom of the press. In multiple instances, he has demonstrated his flagrant disrespect and disregard for transparency and free information. In fact, journalist James Risen, who was targeted by the Obama administration for refusing to reveal sources in a CIA leak, called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”
The president went on to discuss the problem of campaign finance: