Smoking Outside the White House Correspondents Dinner.

On the state of the press.

I was in a fury earlier this week reading The Atlantic—David Brooks’s essay, “I Should Have Seen It Coming,” struck a great nerve. If he could not notice what I easily did, and half his peers were shouting about it, ought he be drawing a paycheck sharing his wisdom? I had been a long-time viewer of PBS’s Shields and Brooks, so I do not dislike the man, but increasingly I have felt like a sucker for defending institutions like The New York Times when their editorialists are this blithely naive.

So, as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend—always an affair in Washington—approached, I penned this with great nastiness:

“The White House Correspondents’ Dinner—nerd prom—is unearned this year. In truth, the Washington press corps that so comprehensively failed the country ought to be buying us dinner. The disinvitation of Amber Ruffin is not something I intend to forgive. Ms. Ruffin called the administration ‘a bunch of murderers,’ which is true, and later excused herself thusly: ‘I thought when people take away your rights, erase your history, and deport your friends, you’re supposed to call it out.’ No man of courage, character, or conviction would disagree.

If the legacy media has so thoroughly failed to educate and inform the public that it elected President Donald Trump, a fascist huckster, thought tariffs would reduce inflation, believed that apartment buildings were under the dictum of cat-eating thugs. If these newspapers, websites, and television networks have let democracy die on a bright-lit day, they deserve no celebration. If they pour ink and electricity and pay administration surrogates to excuse the regime, then why should they spend the evening honoring and congratulating themselves?

The evening has a second remit that they could at least hew to: entertaining the public. That would be as impactful as any speech about the importance of a free press.”

Then I thought, “Perhaps I should go and see if they are feeling ashamed of themselves.” That has been one of the ways my politics have changed since 2024—now, I might still trust, but faith is not a given. I will verify. I will go look at them with my own eyes, size up the stock in person, examine the flesh, and make sure they are still sound for work.

I do blame the failure of the Washington press corps for the current state of things. I know many of the individual writers are doing their best. But after 2024, it is not enough to simply trust they will do their best—too many incentives to compromise with the regime to save themselves from retribution.

Mr. Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” then punished the Associated Press by barring its journalists from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other press pool events, explicitly calling press access a ‘privilege’ that could be withdrawn at his discretion, citing their refusal to internalize his Newspeak. I took that personally. I will also never remember to call it “Gulf of America” unless I am using a mocking tone. To me, the attack on the Associated Press is an attack on, well, all the press who are associating. And I do not like that shit at all.

I was expecting a bit more solidarity from the White House correspondents, as they showed in 2009 when the Obama administration tried to exclude Fox News from a pool interview with a Treasury official, and the other major networks refused to participate without them. The WHCA backed AP, filed a supporting brief and condemned the ban as an attempt by the administration to “choose the journalists” who cover the president, but they also clearly wanted to get picked.

A Trump adviser told Axios: “The AP and the White House Correspondents Association wanted to [fuck] around. Now it’s finding out time.” Ah, “fuck around and find out,” “FAFO,” defined by the Anti-Defamation League as “a slogan used by the Proud Boys to suggest they are always prepared for a fight, and if a person confronts or messes with them, that person will be sorry.” Antifascist activists, edgelords, and all types of guys with beards use this phrase to indicate that unpleasant or violent retaliation will follow crossing them.

Fox should have stood first beside the AP, then, but they offered no solidarity while Mr. Trump gave favor to sycophantic media and punished journalists whose coverage offended him. They might have once benefited from camaraderie, but they chose against giving it when it was due. Their corporate character is that of a poor friend—they will simply allow the president to punish their rivals and thrive in the absence of competition. This is short-sighted of Rupert Murdoch—Mr. Trump has called him a “piece of shit,” so it takes little imagination to understand the same cudgel will eventually swing his way. Fox reporters ought to be more loyal to their guild companions, not their ideological ones, or else they will fare as poorly.

For the rest of the corps, I expected more than they gave. When AP reporters were banned, everybody else’s coverage continued as normal—no walkouts, only cautious statements of disapproval. I at least understand the rationalization that one must maintain access even at the cost of some sacrifices (and assuredly those sacrifices are easier when they are your competitors). But at least be honest, say: “Hey, we’re rationalizing this shit on purpose. We’re making a devil’s bargain because we think it’ll pay off.”

And to be clear, I am not inherently against compromising oneself for the greater good—if Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic (which has still not sent me my tote bag) had to give weekly hand massages to White House Communications Director and insult comic Stephen Cheung (by far the funniest man in Washington) while Mr. Cheung workshopped a litany of insults for him personally, but in return the public got a greater insight into the administration’s machinations, then I would demand Mr. Goldberg stock up on CBD massage creams.

This bargain will not pay off. Two weeks before the Dinner, after a Trump-appointed judge ordered the White House to restore AP’s access, the regime responded to the court loss by gutting the wire services. AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg News lost their permanent seat in the press pool—the guarantee that at any given Oval Office casting couch Q&A, motorcade, or Air Force One trip, one wire service reporter would be present. Now, the wires would be thrown into a raffle for just two pool slots with some thirty-three other print outlets. In practice, this means the newswires, the primary source of credible news for thousands of small papers, TV stations, websites, and international outlets that cannot afford White House correspondents, are fucked.

Verifying the WHCA’s warnings that the administration wanted to “choose the journalists” who would cover it, the Pentagon has also “rotated out” the permanent press stations for NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, Politico, CNN, The Hill, War Zone, and, despite all of Jeff Bezos’s supplication and fawning, The Washington Post. These publications of esteem were to be replaced by tabloids and sycophants, including Newsmax, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, One America News Network, The New York Post, Breitbart News, and, for some reason, The Huffing-and-Puffington Post.

Of course, the hostility to the press is not simply procedural. Mr. Trump and his goons also outright verbally abuse them on camera. Mr. Trump called Kaitlin Collins a “low-rated anchor,” who “nobody watches,” and claimed “CNN… hate[s] our country. It’s a shame.” Nobody in the room thought to offer their colleague a defense. CNN’s Dana Bash denied that the network “hates” the United States, which is a strange, childlike accusation to have to respond to, but Mr. Trump’s outbursts are frequently this vitriolic, reminiscent of the sort of thing that would send a student to the guidance counselor. For example, during the campaign, he suggested that he “would not mind” if a gunman “had to shoot through the fake news [to get to him].”

Unfortunately, my plan to hang around the DC Hilton’s entrance wearing the tuxedo I keep in the trunk of my car, smoking cigarettes, and searching for a White House correspondent to wave my finger at was foiled. The security barriers and checkpoints were already oppressive by the time I arrived. The sidewalk was already full of spirited Gaza protesters and, for some reason, a man affiliated with PETA dressed like a cat, so I could not even loiter there.

From the periphery, I could observe nothing out of the ordinary. Black cars let out VIPs; men and women in tuxedos and dresses walked confidently through to the venue. You could not tell from their bearings that the night before, Mr. Trump’s Justice Department had issued new guidance authorizing prosecutors to subpoena journalists’ records and compel them to reveal confidential sources, threatening prosecution for refusal. Nothing about their faces looked particularly different from last year, or any previous year, which demonstrates either great resilience or some unwarranted surety that a president who has previously threatened journalists with prison rape would take it easy on them.

From Rolling Stone, October 23, 2022:

“You take the writer and/or the publisher of the paper, a certain paper that you know, and you say, ‘Who is the leaker?’ National security,” Trump said at the rally. “And they say, ‘We’re not gonna tell you.’ Then [you] say, ‘That’s OK. You’re going to jail.’ And when this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner very shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that leaker [is]. It was Bill Jones, I swear, he’s the leaker.’ And we got him. But they don’t want to do that.”

I went to crash the Substack New Media Party at the LINE Hotel instead (which, thankfully, President Elon Musk did not purchase), because they supposedly had an open bar, but I encountered the same scenario. Even the stoop outside the No Goodbyes bar and restaurant, which is an obvious and favored spot to light one up, was closed to the public.

I was determined to find my way to an open bar that night, because it would be a bit embarrassing to have walked several miles through the Capitol in a tuxedo and stayed sober the whole time, so I slipped into a wedding reception at another hotel. I got a Long Island Iced Tea from the caterer, and watched the Dinner on the lobby television beside a young man who claimed to be the maid of honor’s cousin and kept wishing Stephen Colbert were there again.

My immediate reaction was to snarl at the stream and call it “some pick-me shit.” The awards presented at the Dinner were for reporting on President Joe Biden’s “diminished capacity,” the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump, fentanyl smuggling, and prison labor. In other words, topics that do not offend the current administration. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Ph.D. student at Tufts University, was, for the crime of writing an op-ed critical of Israel, taken by masked ICE agents, put in a car, and imprisoned in a “hellhole” pending deportation—might that have been more topical and salient? Perhaps some critique of legacy media organizations accommodating this hostile president at the behest of their billionaire owners, like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (whose editorial board once presciently warned: “Trump doesn’t want your vote in 2024. Just your obedience while he trashes the U.S. again.”) I came out for some verification the press knows their peril. If they did, they talked about anything else.

My most charitable assumption goes back to the devil’s bargain I suggested earlier: perhaps they are trying to give the White House a bit of flattery today, build credibility with conservatives so that tomorrow they can expose the regime’s sins to the morning sun. If that were the plan, then they have still failed—by firing the comedian and giving the most boring imaginable set of self-congratulatory speeches, they earned no audience, and their words and efforts will go into the wind.

If we imagine this was the last night of the free press, and that by Monday morning, the White House will begin to start prosecuting anyone who talked to anyone in the federal government on background, would this have been a worthy goodbye to the institution? Would it have met the moment, and highlighted the dangers coming?

Dear Reader, I understand why you might question why I did not excise the anecdote of walking to the perimeter of the Dinner and being turned away. On its face, it seems pointless, perhaps obvious or even presumptuous—of course one cannot walk up to the entrance of a high-profile, black-tie affair, and smoke cigarettes until you find someone to chat with!

First of all, I brought a flask too, so for anyone ready to “spill the tea,” I was planning to share some mid-shelf whiskey. Even when he is planning on crashing an open bar, Hex never comes empty-handed.

Second, that image is core to the way I think the American People ought to understand the White House Press Corps. We cannot trust that the people inside our institutions are doing the right or optimal things, and in many cases, we can be certain they are doing some bad things, too. But even if we put some effort into going to federal buildings or calling agencies and asking questions, most of us are not going to have the access we need to see past the perimeter.

The guys in tuxedos have those credentials, and we need them to describe accurately what they see when they go inside, or else we have no fucking clue what is going on in the world outside our own lives, work, friends, and family. They have an obligation to tell us everything and to get it right. On Saturday, they gave themselves awards for doing that.

I want to be clear: I am not trying to disrespect the legacy media. I am insisting it remain worthy of respect. That means standing up for itself, for its agencies and adjacent industries, for viewers at home, and for the American people generally. And if, along the way, they leave the bar open for a few worn-out editorialists and bloggers, I will raise my glass to them—as long as it is not watered down.