Craig Ferguson to perform at correspondents' dinner

Just a few months after he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen, Craig Ferguson is going face-to-face with President Bush and the rest of the Washington establishment.

Ferguson, the host of CBS' ''Late Late Show,'' is the featured entertainer Saturday night at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner.

The Scottish-born Ferguson is expected to find middle ground between the tepid impersonations of last year's entertainer, Rich Little, and the merciless satire that Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert delivered in 2006.

Bush has previously used the dinner, now in its 94th year, to deliver some pointed humor at the expense of his administration and the media. Last year, however, he withheld from joking in light of the deadly shooting at Virginia Tech.

The guest list for the dinner includes plenty of VIPs from outside the Beltway: Actors Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, John Cusack, Pamela Anderson and Claire Danes, singers Ashlee Simpson and the Jonas Brothers and author Salman Rushdie are among the invitees. Washington's power elite is still well represented, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff expected to attend.

During the event, the White House Correspondents' Association is presenting its annual awards, announced earlier this month, to:

— Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press and Ed Henry of CNN, the Merriman Smith Award, the top journalism award for White House reporting under deadline pressure.

Riechmann, the winner in the print category, won for her coverage of President Bush's trip to Iraq's Anbar province last September. Henry won for reporting on the Bush administration's contradicting assertions that top Iranian officials had authorized sending improvised explosive devices to Iraq.

— Alexis Simendinger of the National Journal, the Aldo Beckman Award for sustained excellence in White House coverage. The judges recognized her for breaking the story about the use of Republican National Committee e-mail accounts by some White House officials.

— Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters Paul Shukovsky, Tracy Johnson and Daniel Lathrop, the Edgar A. Poe Award for excellence in coverage of news of national or regional significance. In a series of articles, ''The Terrorism Trade-Off,'' they revealed a major shift by the FBI away from white-collar crimes as it ramped up its pursuit of suspected terrorists.

The White House Correspondents Association was formed in 1914 as a liaison between the press and the president. Every president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the dinner.

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On the Net:

White House Correspondents' Association: http://www.whca.net