CNN — The White House Correspondents’ Association is reversing course and canceling its plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin headline this year’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington, DC.
Instead, the association says it will celebrate the First Amendment and the free press.
“At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” the association’s president, Eugene Daniels, wrote in a memo Saturday.
He said the association’s board voted unanimously to make the change, and did not immediately announce any new speakers.
The change is a tacit acknowledgment of the growing tensions between the association — which represents White House correspondents from dozens of news outlets — and President Donald Trump.
The event typically features comedians, who often use the forum to roast the guests, particularly those holding office. Presidents have traditionally given light-hearted remarks at the dinner. Last year’s dinner featured remarks by “Saturday Night Live” comedian Colin Jost and then-President Joe Biden, who took jabs at Trump and poked fun at his own age.
Trump skipped the annual dinner during his first four years in office and was expected to snub it again this April.
Some members of the association were privately concerned about the optics of a comedian who is harshly critical of Trump serving as the evening’s entertainment, televised and streamed live in prime time.
It was easy to predict the aftermath — denunciations from the right, free-speech defenses from the left — which is what happened when Trump was roasted by comedian Michelle Wolf in 2018.
The association has been under severe pressure this year as the Trump White House has banned The Associated Press from some events and taken control of press pool assignments, all part of a broader effort to assert power and clamp down on independent news coverage. White House correspondents aren’t exactly in a celebratory mood.
Meanwhile, conservative media outlets aligned with Trump have been planning their own alternative events around the April 26 dinner. Scores of media companies buy tables at the annual dinner, and many hold their own receptions surrounding the event.
Daniels said Saturday that “as the date nears, I will share more details of the plans in place to honor journalistic excellence and a robust, independent media covering the most powerful office in the world.”
Clown Population. The clowns inside the White House are only a small fraction of a total society of mock for mock, reactionary mocking, clowns. The entire nation is a "basket case of clowning around" on social machines / HDTV media machines / mockery.
People like to play a game of psychological denial and say ONLY MAGA is the clowns, only the White House is the clowns. It's the entire population of Untied States of America.
Ahh, playing that I'm not "A Real American" because my English isn't like Fox News / I sound like "an immigrant" angle. I get that all the time on anonymous social media. I see you joined Lemmy 3 weeks ago, and don't use your real name.
In other words, if I want to draw the largest crowds in world history, sound like Donald Trump has since year 2014 on social media systems. Gotcha.
"You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox. Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it."
Why don't you learn how to use English better, come join me over on the Lemmy community for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake lessons? 100 years ago James Joyce addressed English readers like you: !JamesJoyceExperience@lemm.ee
::::: __________
Russia-watcher Catherine Fitzpatrick, who documents Kremlin disinformation for InterpreterMag .com, says just as Moscow uses vague Internet laws to encourage self-censorship, trolls inhibit informed debate by using crude dialogue to change "the climate of discussion." "If you show up at The Washington Post or New Republic sites, where there's an article that's critical of Russia, and you see that there are 200 comments that sound like they were written by 12-year-olds, then you just don't bother to comment," she says. "You don't participate. It's a way of just driving discussion away completely," she adds. "Those kinds of tactics are meant to stop democratic debate, and they work." - year 2014