Why CNN Wouldn’t Cut Away From White House Shindig To Cover Huge Freddie Gray Protest

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As politicians, celebrities, and journalists gathered for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night in D.C., just miles away in Baltimore, Maryland, a big crowd marched to protest the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. By Saturday evening, 12 people were reported arrested as some in the largely peaceful crowd threw rocks and smashed windows, and the jumbotron at the Baltimore Orioles game warned fans to stay inside.

But you wouldn’t have known any of that from CNN, which chose to stick with live coverage of every second of the White House dinner. “The most powerful man in the world is going to tell some jokes,” contributor Errol Louis explained, with scenes of the gala in the background. If you wanted to know what was going on with the rallies, you could “find a live feed” somewhere, he said—just not, evidently, on America’s 24-hour news network.

“We sort of make our best choices, and we’ll catch up,” Louis said. “They’ll find out all of what happened in the streets of Baltimore by this time tomorrow.”