The WHCA dinner has become a hot ticket around Washington, and a command performance for the president himself. The event brings in about 2,700 people each year, and every sitting president since Calvin Coolidge has attended at least one of the dinners. But there will be something missing from this annual convocation of D.C.'s literati. This year, the New York Times is boycotting.

"I just think the whole thing has become unseemly," says Michael Oreskes, Washington bureau chief of the Times. "It's the whole circus atmosphere. It's the whole sense of bacchanalia."

Though the Times' decision to stay at home and wash its hair that night is (predictably) inspiring accusations of holier-than-though prissiness, Oreskes is right. In recent years, the dinner has become a farce, as reporters and their political sources blur the professional boundaries and join together for a self-referential nudge-nudge, wink-wink send-up of the last year's political scandals. But perhaps it's only fitting that the dinner has become a grotesque spectacle that makes it the perfect metaphor for modern journalism.

Just months after the Times helped "semen-stained dress" enter the American vernacular, for instance, seems a strange time for Oreskes to take the moral high ground. The Times' decision to boycott is a reaction to the spectacle the dinner has become in recent years, with the annual guest list including Hollywood stars and quasi-celebrities like Paula Jones, who attended the dinner last year as the plus one for Paul Rodriguez, the editor of the conservative Insight magazine. This year's guest list includes Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who will be the guest of George magazine. Chain-smoking she-devil Lucianne Goldberg is also rumored to be on the guest list.

Ironically, the WHCA dinner's new reputation as an upscale gross-out contest is all Michael Kelly's fault. That's right: smart, self-righteous, talented Michael Kelly, the editor of the bible of Washington substance, the National Journal.

Kelly's the one who gave the annual event the initial shove down the slippery slope. By inviting the sexy, scandalous Fawn Hall to the dinner in 1987, Kelly -- then 30 and a reporter for the Baltimore Sun -- was the first to bring what former White House Press Secretary Jody Powell calls "tacky guests" to the dinner. It's been all downhill from there.

"Frankly, we're doing the profession a disservice," Oreskes said. "Publishers are using this to promote the commercial interests of their publications and the collateral damage is a black eye to the journalism profession. This year it's time to change course."

According to Stewart Powell, White House correspondent for Hearst Newspapers and president of the WCHA, the dinner is supposed to be a stately affair. "President Clinton has been to our dinner every year," he says, "and we feel very honored that he wants to come and share an evening with us. We are at the White House every day ... this is our chance to invite the president to our place."

Not that presidents have always come willingly. In a June 2, 1971, memo to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon complained that, despite his attendance at the WHCA dinner, ''reporters were more bad-mannered and vicious than usual'' at a subsequent press conference. ''This bears out my theory," Nixon wrote, "that treating them with considerably more contempt is in the long run a more productive policy."

President Jimmy Carter, too, hated going, and ended up missing more of them than he attended. "There are about five or six dinners given in the first half of the year given by news organizations," says Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, "all of whom expect the president and the first lady to show up, provide free entertainment and sit back while they get dissed. I always thought it was one of the most incredibly presumptuous institutions in Washington society ... And of course, that was in the old days when people were polite and well-mannered and civilized."

Conflict of interest charges have also dogged the event. There are plenty of critics who find fault with official socializing between the ruling class and the supposedly impartial reporters who were to protect the republic by diligently covering them. Some uneasiness about reporters who walk within seduction-length of power is no doubt merited. Still, Washington is a company town, and it's an over-inflated outrage for anyone to object that reporters and government officials can be friends or, at least, friendly.

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