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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Beltway Humor: When presidents appear at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, it's traditional for them to tell a few jokes. But when George W. Bush appeared last week (3/24/04), he made a series of "jokes" about the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that had been the central justification of his invasion of Iraq. Part of Bush's routine included slides showing administration officials looking around the White House for something. "Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere," Bush explained while showing one of the images, which elicited laughter from the audience of politicians and media figures. Interestingly, Bush's comments were hardly controversial to the Beltway press corps, which seemed to write it off as harmlessly "self-deprecating" humor. Many of the press accounts the next day did not raise questions about Bush's humorous reference to his administration's bogus rationale for a war that has cost thousands of lives-- American and Iraqi. For the media, such humor was expected. "Well, every night we hear people on TV telling jokes about President Bush, but last night it was the president's turn to tell jokes about the president," CBS anchor Julie Chen explained (3/25/04), adding that "at least someone's making jokes about it other than the late-night talk show hosts." CNN's American Morning show on March 25 provided a glimpse at the gulf between the media reaction and the public response to Bush's sense of humor. After playing some clips from Bush's speech, CNN anchor Bill Hemmer mentioned that "there was a slideshow shown a little later. Maybe we'll get to that later in our broadcast. There were some good funny lines in that, too." To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1837 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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