As Baltimore protested, mainstream press partied. Jon Stewart had something to say about that.
"To be clear, a guy on CNN just said, 'Hey, if people are looking for news, I'm sure they can find it somewhere.'"
News media, celebrities, politicians, and their friends gathered on Saturday in Washington, D.C., for the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner.
It's an occasion for press and pals to hang out with the people they're covering in a big ol' event where the president tells some jokes (with varying degrees of success), and everyone pokes fun of Washington's insider culture.
Saturday also happened to be a day when the city of Baltimore protested in the wake of Freddie Gray's death.
Generally speaking, anytime the local baseball team feels that it's necessary to lock fans in their stadium because of civil unrest outside, that's an occasion where a news organization might want to have a camera or two in the area.
Jon Stewart took a look at how news organizations handled covering both events, and it was both hilarious and depressing.
Starting with an overview of the situation, Stewart goes into some of the more ridiculous attempts to balance coverage, which included a CNN panelist basically telling viewers interested in learning about Baltimore to go look it up on their own.
When the panel finally does talk about what's going on in Baltimore, even acknowledging that "this is what people are talking about," they cut back to red carpet coverage just moments later.
One panelist (on the right side of the image here) basically told people to look Baltimore up if it was that important to them.
The disconnect between the two stories is even bigger considering how close Washington, D.C., and Baltimore are.
It's kind of strange to have some of the country's best journalists at a party just 40 miles away from an uprising, right?
I mean.
While no one is doubting the entertainment value of the WHCD, the decision to largely ignore the protests was bizarre.
WHCD host Cecily Strong even joked about the fact that police who kill unarmed black men seem to get away with it on a regular basis. You can watch her full monologue on C-SPAN.
