Why did the press corps toast a notorious White House spinner?

The guest of honor at the Feb. 2 party was Lanny Davis, President Clinton's outgoing minister of damage control. The venue was the Holeman Lounge at the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C. And the celebrants included--among others--investigative reporters from the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, all gathered for a final kiss of the master spinner's ring.

Why did the top reporters make merry with Davis for three hours and pay tribute to him with bawdy toasts? After all, Davis had earned a reputation as one of the city's most egregious news twisters during Sen. Fred Thompson's campaign-finance hearings, spinning any reporter who came near that the hearings' findings were old news. In the early days of the Lewinsky eruption, Davis provided the same obfuscating service.

The truth is that we Washington reporters love being spun--or, to put it bluntly, love being lied to. The underlying reasons are transparent. If politicians and their mouthpieces gave it to us straight, we'd have nothing to interpret and write. So we swoon when important people return our calls. (We've been asked to dance!) We thrill at the telephone game of question and evasion, thinking our guile and cunning will ultimately yield truth. We play the tortuous game of spin and leak because we must feed the deadline beast--that is, serve a new piece of the puzzle to our reading public every day. So what if some of the pieces are ill-fitting and manufactured from partial truths?

There are few new steps in this dance. In his book on Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson recounts how the diplomat would summon reporters for supposedly intimate discussions and solicit their opinions. Then he'd feed them junk, which they'd publish. Lee Atwater was more cynical, deliberately telling reporters things off the record, knowing that they'd view that information as more credible and use it.

Technically, the Davis party wasn't a celebration; it was a roast. Davis aide Adam Goldberg booked the room, purchased appetizers, and conjured the crowd. (At least it was a cash bar.) Glenn Simpson, an aggressive reporter at the Wall Street Journal, agreed to lend his name to the party to make it seem like a press-related event. The invitations were faxed around town, with Simpson as the RSVP contact. Joining Simpson at the party were a bunch of White House types and about two dozen journalists, including Susan Schmidt from the Washington Post (herself a victim of recent White House spinning), Thomas Galvin from the New York Daily News, and Marc Lacey of the Los Angeles Times.

Simpson declines to talk about the party, citing Journal policy. He was anything but speechless at the party itself, serving as master of ceremonies and delivering what many thought was a hilarious speech.

One attendee conceded that the appearances of the Davis fete are all wrong. "We were treating it almost as a birthday party," the reporter said, asking for anonymity. "We all wrote a big card and signed it and thanked him."

"I wrote on this card if you come across any news call me," said Lacey. He insisted that such socializing is a cost of doing business in Washington: "For me it was a sort of source-development thing." But he added, "You wonder whether it just shows that folks are too close."

Lacey's anonymous colleague spots a parable in the Davis prom: "In this town, you are judged by how well you can get a story leaked to you, not how well you can develop a story on your own and connect the dots," she said. "You get stuff leaked to you in the caste system. You don't have a lot of people out there filing FOIAs or figuring out some path that hasn't been walked before."

But reporters don't need artful seducers like Davis to make news. One of my colleagues who worked for the New York Times' Washington bureau during Watergate says that getting your calls returned by official sources like Davis is a false, overvalued currency. You claw your way into a position to get your calls returned by actually breaking stories, but that reward is empty. It means that you're the seventh or eighth on the call list to be lied to, instead of the 25^th.