It was the nicest tweet Donald Trump had ever sent about the media. On Saturday, he announced he would not be appearing at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner (an annual roast with journalists and the sitting president), and even wished the attendees well, with nary a "FAKE NEWS!" or "failing New York Times" to be found.
The tweet ended a month of journalistic hand-wringing about the upcoming event. It is, after all, uncomfortable to dine and drink and joke with someone you're worried may be a fascist, and who has spent the last year attempting to denigrate and dismantle your work. But Trump's cancellation solved that problem, while creating a real opportunity: a chance for the Washington press corps to rethink the clubbish access journalism that has come to define their work in the capital.
The White House Correspondents' Dinner is the distillation of the problem with America's political journalism (and US politics more broadly). It sits at the nexus of entertainment, politics, and journalism, blurring the lines between the three beyond recognition.
Started in 1921, just as Hollywood and US celebrity culture were emerging, the dinner brought together the president and vice-president with the reporters assigned to the White House. Celebrities provided the entertainment and a bit of glamour.
Through years of Depression and war, the event was occasionally cancelled. But when Eisenhower came into the White House, he resumed the dinners and ratcheted up the star power. His first dinner in 1953 included Bob Hope and Ethel Merman. But the biggest star was Eisenhower himself, a celebrity in his own right after World War II. Celebrity and politics were blending not only at the annual dinners, but in the Oval Office itself. The same was true while John Kennedy was in office, when glamour and celebrity were as much a part of the presidency as Hollywood.
The other defining feature of the dinner was the relationship between the president and the press. Ostensibly an event to celebrate journalism, the White House Correspondents' Dinner was just as much about insiders, access, and elites decided what the US people needed to know. It was an era when journalists hid one president's paralysis and another's steady string of affairs, when there was little tension between objective journalism and a heavy reliance on official sources.
Journalists in mid-century America portrayed themselves as steady strivers for truth, working to hold the powerful to account. But the annual dinners suggested that such work was for sport, that just as Republicans and Democrats jousted on the floor of Congress then retired to cigars and bourbon after hours, the press and politicians parried by day and partied by night.
Richard Nixon, whose relationship with the Washington press corps was far more contentious than his predecessors, was the first president to refuse to attend out of spite. After the 1971 dinner, he dashed off a note to his aide Bob Haldemann, noting that despite having been a "good sport" at the affair, the next day the press corps was "considerably more bad-mannered and vicious than usual. This bears out my theory," he continued, "that treating them with considerably more contempt is in the long run a more productive policy".
And treat them with contempt he did. He attended neither the 1972 nor the 1974 dinner.
By the 1990s, hand-wringing over the impropriety of the event had become part of the ritual. In 1999, The New York Times officially boycotted what it called an "antic opera bouffe of media, celebrity and politics". The Washington Post wondered whether the event had become a "narcissistic Godzilla of journalistic self-congratulation".
It had, but that didn't stop the press from attending. In fact, the dinner only grew larger, unhampered by the massive press failures before the Iraq War under George Bush, nor the Obama administration's persecution of journalists like James Rosen, who the Justice Department named a "criminal co-conspirator" in order to find his sources.
It took Donald Trump to finally disrupt the nerd-prom nonsense, to get political journalists as a group to examine the clubby relationships upon which their work rests. Targeted by the White House and distrusted by the majority of Americans, journalists have found themselves on one hand convinced that their work is more important than ever, and on the other without the kind of credibility that they need to do that work successfully.
Ditching the we're-all-in-this-together part of the White House Correspondents' Dinner can be a step toward regaining that credibility, but only if it is coupled with some real self-reflection. Political journalism today tends towards unearned self-congratulation, asserting rather than demonstrating that journalists are indispensable guardians of democracy. There is a lot of talk about journalistic truth and light and heroism. There is a lot less discussion of journalistic failure.
If the Trump-less dinner becomes just another exercise in self-congratulation, it will be just as worthless as a dinner with Trump in attendance. If, however, the journalists in attendance use the occasion to host an honest, difficult conversation about doing their work better, then maybe there is a reason to keep the tradition going.
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