Pompous, hysterical, historically ignorant, self-important, self-pitying, smug, inept. It’s that time of year again.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner began in 1921 with, you’re not going to believe this, White House correspondents. Just them. There were no stunt invitations, no Hollywood celebrities at anyone’s table. It was for people who covered the presidency, actively and directly. There were fifty of them. It was a professional dinner, a collegial gathering of men who shared a task and a duty. The organization that sponsored the thing, the White House Correspondents’ Association, had been created a few years earlier to fight for access to information. They were doing something.
The event has swollen now to an average attendance around 2,600 people, who must do a lot of very important journalisming, because look how much deeply reported information you get in the news. Pee tapes, Hunter Biden’s laptop being Russian disinformation, Joe Biden having a sharp and agile mind, all the big important topics.
And still they celebrate themselves. Somewhere in the recent past, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner turned into a dimwitted circus, like everything else. The not unreasonable small-d democratic principle that powerful officials are obliged to submit to jokes and criticism in the presence of professional antagonists who have the role of questioning them has turned into a smug recitation of received wisdom from the mindless automatons who wrote all those stories about the Steele Dossier. It’s a place where a couple thousand of Ted Baxters get to preen, and self-flattering insiders get to open their bowels on people they wish to depict as untermenschen.
It’s masturbatory garbage.
This year, incredibly, a bunch of journalists have written an open letter to the White House Correspondents’ Association demanding that they use the annual dinner as a forum to rebuke Trump for being mean. You can read the whole zombie hallucination thing here, and let’s entertain ourselves by reviewing some of the claims from this group of professional journalists. Here’s the whole third paragraph, and slow down to read this carefully:
The collective weight of the administration’s actions — retaliatory access bans, coercive regulatory investigations, frivolous lawsuits against the press, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists, personal verbal attacks on reporters, assaults on the media in official White House press releases and social media posts, the arrest of journalists, and the pardoning of those who committed violence against the press — represent the most systematic and comprehensive assault on freedom of the press by a sitting American president.
John Adams shut down newspapers and imprisoned editors. So did Lincoln, more aggressively. Woodrow Wilson’s administration used the Sedition Act of 1918 to imprison nearly a thousand people for criticism of the president and his war, including editors and publishers. But Donald Trump, with his “personal verbal attacks on reporters” and “assaults on the media in official White House press releases and social media posts” – because apparently journalists are a holy class that can’t ever be criticized – is undertaking “the most systematic and comprehensive assault on freedom of the press by a sitting American president.”
There’s simply no way to exaggerate how brutally stupid and functionally useless the legacy media have become. They’re Fredo.
It’s unfortunate that the president has decided to flatter them by showing up to their night of pompous and idiotic self-pleasure.
