From a story on cjr.org by Kyle Pope headlined “Formal dinners and the affordability of news”:

For years, the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner has been a bad look for journalism. At a time when Americans increasingly say they don’t trust the media, and when many people believe the mainstream press is a tool of the establishment, the optics of a ballroom full of reporters in formal dress surrounded by the people they are supposed to cover grow worse by the year.