Just as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner began, the online livestream C-SPAN was streaming suddenly stopped. An onscreen legend indicated that the event had already ended.
The stream eventually returned. But the critically-inclined viewer might have responded to the C-SPAN text: No kidding. “There’s no president, there’s no comedian,” declared White House Correspondents’ Association president Eugene Daniels from the stage of an event that has historically featured both. The result was an evening that — to those not in the room — seemed to serve no particular purpose at all.
Daniels treated the insular nature of the dinner as a bonus; returning to the stage, later, to present awards, he declared, “As I promised, it’s just us.” And perhaps there’s little to do but put a happy face on one notable absence: That President Donald Trump skipped the dinner — traditionally a chummy moment that at once celebrates the freedom and inquisitiveness of journalists and could seem to raise ethical questions as they break bread with their subjects — came as no meaningful surprise. He never attended it during his first term, after slights by both comedian Seth Meyers and then-President Barack Obama were reported to have enraged him at the 2011 edition.
The cancellation of planned entertainer Amber Ruffin was less expected. In recent memory, the Correspondents’ Association has shown a notable lack of backbone about a dinner that was, of course, simpler to put on in less contentious times. The group didn’t hire an entertainer at all the year after Michelle Wolf’s 2018 comedy set in which she raked both Trump administration officials and journalists over the coals. But Ruffin’s firing, which hollowed out the evening entirely, seemed like a new benchmark. In February of this year, organization head Daniels had commented, “When I began to think about what entertainer would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year, Amber was immediately at the top of my list.” This was presumably due to the exact traits that got her booted — her directness of approach and sharpness. Her firing promptly followed a podcast interview in which she compared the Trump administration to “kind of a bunch of murderers.”
The lesson: Speaking truth to power is to be celebrated, until it isn’t. The organization had ceded control of the program to an invited guest who wasn’t even to be in attendance. But for remarking on the general absence of a comedian, Daniels made no comment on Ruffin in his opening remarks, which took the striking form of an awards-show acceptance speech. Daniels credited and thanked all the people who had supported him through a period that, he said, had been one of intense professional strain. It was relatable, but also seemed to lack resonance to the moment — beyond that said moment had been a challenge for Daniels.
This was, for a long stretch of time, the only content from the dinner worth showing at all: MSNBC’s broadcast of the event ceded the time to a panel of commentators who ran through a litany of talking points about how the Trump restoration has gone so far. They made some small amount of time to reflect on past glories, as well, with a journalist who had, in the past worked as a cater waiter over the Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend, lamenting that, in former years, the event was used to debut “all the new food trends, all the new linen trends.”
Leaving the hospitality angle — which was at least something novel for MSNBC — entirely aside, the evening seemed to collapse in on itself from a TV angle. An event that putatively celebrates speaking up and speaking out went on without the person hired to do precisely that; an event that is meant to speak to the service journalists provide to the American people began with a journalist’s lengthy, less-than-charming self-aggrandizement.
When the programming of the evening picked back up, various luminaries of journalism (CNN’s Abby Phillip and NBC’s Kristen Welker among them) presented awards to members of the organization, whose work is creditable and whose respective moments in the spotlight, such as it was, were heartening. Journalists honoring their colleagues and competitors might, under other circumstances, have felt like undue backscratching. On an evening during which it was “just us” because anyone else who might have appeared on the stage was either a hostile president or someone whose presence might have caused him to go nuclear, individual group members speaking about the work they did to hold the powerful to account felt meaningful.
If only the group honoring them held the idea of holding power to account in mind while planning the dinner. The WHCA’s firing of Ruffin was unfortunate, but the “just us” framing by Daniels felt outright counterfactual — yes, it literally was just journalists speaking, and Daniels was in an impossible situation of his own group’s making. But the elision of what had been planned — and the absence of the direct critique that has been a hallmark of this event for decades, out of fear of the man these journalists are capable of covering well — marks a low point for a dinner that, this year, was in many ways over before it began.
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