'Press Club' Looks Back, Fondly

But the Lead Is Buried in This 100-Year History on WETA

In making "The National Press Club at 100: A Century of Headlines," Washington documentary filmmakers Gerald Krell, Meyer Odze and Adam Krell set out to pay tribute to the role of independent journalism by saluting one of its great institutions.

But though the film (which debuts tonight on WETA) is fitfully insightful and frequently entertaining, the birthday party ultimately soft-pedals the pricklier issue of the club's relevance, and that of the "credentialed" Washington press itself, in the Internet age.

In doing so, "A Century of Headlines" also exposes a lingering nostalgia for the good old days of bourbon-and-soda and hot-off-the-press. Which is not entirely surprising: The club was founded not as a muckrakers' congress but because in 1908, Washington bars were required to close at midnight and newspapermen wanted an after-hours watering hole. Prohibition-era President Warren Harding, himself a former newspaper publisher, drank and played poker and regaled fellow members with risque "leaks," secure in the knowledge that he, like subsequent chief executives, was chummily off the record.

Radio and television correspondents were grudgingly admitted to the club in 1948. Female journalists were not allowed in until 1956, and even then were restricted to the balcony until 1971 -- a fact that New York Times columnist Russell Baker later refers to in honoring Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory for making it "from the balcony to the head table." The first black reporter was admitted only in 1955, and the appearance there of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. seven years later led to the resignation of some white members.

But once having presumably established the integrity of the club, the documentary veers off into a long series of punch lines from Press Club events. President Lyndon B. Johnson, for instance, jokingly explains the famous photo of himself exposing his appendectomy scar as a response to another feisty Texan, journalist Sarah McClendon, who asked what he had to show for his years in the White House.

Columnist Carl Rowan gets off a Churchillian jab at a reader who called his being black and stupid a double burden; Rowan replies that fortunately for her, she labored under only half his handicap. Robert Redford, Itzhak Perlman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Dalai Lama, Victor Borge and NBC White House correspondent David Gregory (impersonating Tom Brokaw) are among others providing chuckles.

As the clips continue, it's hard not to feel that the Press Club members consider themselves as much Washington insiders as observers. By the time Marvin Kalb urges journalism students to practice skepticism, and The Post's Bob Woodward admits that he should have gone public with information about questionable pre-Iraq War intelligence, their solemnity seems oddly out of place.

More disappointing, the specter of online journalism is conjured but not seriously addressed. Matt Drudge, whose Web-based Drudge Report elevated political gossip into instant news, is introduced at a 1998 Press Club luncheon as someone who "represents the cutting edge of a revolution in our business, and everyone in our business knows it." A class of young journalists is told that there are 70 million blogs in the United States alone, and the students are instructed on setting up blogs of their own.

The competition from those 70 million-plus bloggers and the larger online institutions, however, goes all but unmentioned. It's hard to think that either the makers of the documentary or most of their interview subjects are sincerely grappling with the passing of the journalistic torch. Walter Cronkite's epilogue here -- wishing the club another 100 years because the work of Washington journalists is "fundamental . . . to the workings of our democracy" -- sounds forebodingly elegiac.

The National Press Club: A Century of Headlines (one hour) debuts tonight at 10 on Channel 26.