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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/sarah-huckabee-sanders-was-fair-game-for-michelle-wolfs-whcd-insults.html
After a few big-name journalists panned Michelle Wolf’s act at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, the association that hosts the dinner published its own negative review of the comedian’s performance. In a statement that referred to Wolf only as “the entertainer,” White House Correspondents’ Association president Margaret Talev said Wolf’s monologue “was not in the spirit of [the dinner’s] mission … to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and scholarship winners.”
For anyone who has ever watched a WHCD monologue, this stated mission may come as a surprise. The WHCA invites comedians to its annual black-tie dinner to make fun of the president, other politicians, and the press, not to champion civil discourse or fete a teen who won a scholarship. At last year’s event, headliner Hasan Minhaj joked that Jeff Sessions loves the n-word, that Betsy DeVos collects the tears of children, and that Steve Bannon is a literal Nazi. If the WHCA was unhappy in 2017 to receive the plaudits of viewers who were pleased to see someone express all the things self-serious journalists won’t say, there was no statement issued to that effect.
The organization’s tradition of getting a comedian to roast the current administration is not new. Its capitulation to trumped-up charges of bias from right-wing trolls, however, is. Anyone who claims right-wingers will use Wolf’s monologue as a reason to rebuff the mainstream press is sadly deluded about the main reason why people mistrust journalists these days: Because facts are inconvenient to the self-serving narratives peddled by the GOP, which repeats ad nauseam, via Fox News and right-wing radio, that all other media outlets are telling lies.
There are good arguments to be made about the unseemliness of the WHCD in general—as a rule, journalists shouldn’t be palling around with the political leaders they cover. The idea of TV news anchors in black-tie chortling over their surf n’ turf about some president’s endearing flub can be even harder to stomach under an administration that has posed unprecedented threats to democracy, peace, and human dignity. Watching politicians and journalists abandon their fundamentally antagonistic relationship for a night to congratulate themselves for inheriting some ancient concept of a robust, thriving free press does more to degrade trust in the media than Wolf’s joke about Scott Pruitt ejaculating at the thought of a dying tree. ...
For anyone who has ever watched a WHCD monologue, this stated mission may come as a surprise. The WHCA invites comedians to its annual black-tie dinner to make fun of the president, other politicians, and the press, not to champion civil discourse or fete a teen who won a scholarship. At last year’s event, headliner Hasan Minhaj joked that Jeff Sessions loves the n-word, that Betsy DeVos collects the tears of children, and that Steve Bannon is a literal Nazi. If the WHCA was unhappy in 2017 to receive the plaudits of viewers who were pleased to see someone express all the things self-serious journalists won’t say, there was no statement issued to that effect.
The organization’s tradition of getting a comedian to roast the current administration is not new. Its capitulation to trumped-up charges of bias from right-wing trolls, however, is. Anyone who claims right-wingers will use Wolf’s monologue as a reason to rebuff the mainstream press is sadly deluded about the main reason why people mistrust journalists these days: Because facts are inconvenient to the self-serving narratives peddled by the GOP, which repeats ad nauseam, via Fox News and right-wing radio, that all other media outlets are telling lies.
There are good arguments to be made about the unseemliness of the WHCD in general—as a rule, journalists shouldn’t be palling around with the political leaders they cover. The idea of TV news anchors in black-tie chortling over their surf n’ turf about some president’s endearing flub can be even harder to stomach under an administration that has posed unprecedented threats to democracy, peace, and human dignity. Watching politicians and journalists abandon their fundamentally antagonistic relationship for a night to congratulate themselves for inheriting some ancient concept of a robust, thriving free press does more to degrade trust in the media than Wolf’s joke about Scott Pruitt ejaculating at the thought of a dying tree. ...
