The WHCA Dinner Skips Comedy but Delivers a Message, and Some Soul-Searching

Last year Colin Jost and President Joe Biden provided the entertainment at the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner, with the former bringing along his wife, Scarlett Johansson, and jokingly telling the crowd she had agreed to “individually meet everyone in this room.”

The WHCA proceeded again Saturday night, just without the sitting president, a comedian or any kind of entertainment. But the event still delivered a message about the importance of journalism’s mission — amid an assault on the press by the Trump administration — as well as some soul-searching about its failings.

The latter came from Axios reporter Alex Thompson, one of the evening’s honorees. During his acceptance speech he referred to diminished trust in the press, and how coverage of President Biden contributed to the problem.

“President Biden’s decline and its coverup by the people around him is a reminder that every White House regardless of party is capable of deception,” Thompson said. “But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

Thompson also used the occasion to promote his new book on the topic with CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”

Other winners spoke of the importance of what WHCA members do, while it fell to organization president Eugene Daniels to address the absence of the president, or any entertainment, while delivering a full-throated defense of the press’ role in democracy.

“There’s no president. There’s no comedian. It’s just us,” Daniels, an MSNBC correspondent, said in kicking off the evening, adding that it has been “an extremely difficult year for all of you. It’s been difficult for this association. We’ve been tested, attacked.”

In closing the evening, Daniels spoke about what the association seeks to accomplish, before pointedly adding, “What we are not is the opposition. What we are not is the enemy of the people, and what we are not is the enemy of the state,” a comment that elicited a standing ovation from much of the room.

Daniels also thanked the Associated Press for “never wavering or compromising” in the face of Trump’s attacks on the service, and gave a shout out to the Voice of America, another besieged group under the current White House.

Although Trump wasn’t mentioned by name in that context, another award recipient, BBC News correspondent Anthony Zurcher, spoke of reporting without fear or favor — a basic journalistic premise, he noted, that “means something more now.” He closed by urging his colleagues to “keep being fearless.”

The idea behind the WHCA dinner has always been that the two sides in the normally contentious relationship between Washington officials and the press can declare a one-night truce every year, enjoy a few laughs and benefit the organization. With Trump proclaiming the press “the enemy of the people,” that formula didn’t exist in his first administration and shows no signs of returning in the second.

The decision to do without entertainment followed the WHCA inviting and then disinviting comic Amber Ruffin in the stated effort to avoid divisiveness, not that choosing not to subject the attendees to playful roasting did anything to make the event more attractive to members of the current administration.

Even the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, whose job description involves interacting with reporters, stayed away.

Once one of the hotter tickets in Washington, the so-called “nerd prom” turned out to be a relatively low-key and unusually brief affair, lacking the media-friendly sizzle associated with dinners past.

Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and now a professor at George Washington University, said on C-SPAN that the event had become “too much of a spectacle,” before Trump, and the organization itself, brought that to a halt.

“The basic purpose of the thing should be what it started out as, which is to bring those who cover and those who are covered together,” Sesno said.

Jost ended last year’s event on a semi-serious note — telling print journalists, “Your words bring light to the darkness,” before adding, “Your words train the AI programs that will soon replace you.”

The WHCA hasn’t come up with a replacement for its annual fundraiser yet, but the evening did seek to shift the focus to journalists, as opposed to the A-list guests who attended.

Lacking Trump, the presentation ran a clip package of past presidential appearances at the event going back over 40 years, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

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