Restraint and Fecklessness
The White House Correspondents’ Association has been working hard to maintain diplomacy with Donald Trump. To what end?
In April, not long after law enforcement intercepted a suspected gunman at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner, the group’s president, Weijia Jiang, of CBS News, addressed a ballroom full of rattled journalists who had gone from ducking under tables to reporting the news of their experience. “I said earlier tonight that journalism is a public service, because when there is an emergency, we run to the crisis, not away from it,” she said. “And on a night when we are thinking about the freedoms in the First Amendment, we must also think about how fragile they are.” Jiang was in a champagne sequin gown, visibly shaken. An hour earlier, a series of gunshots had echoed across the dinner party, and Secret Service agents whisked Donald Trump, along with members of the administration, to safety. Back at the White House, late that evening, Trump hosted a press conference and praised Jiang for doing a “fantastic job” with the event. He also used the occasion to pitch his planned ballroom as a more secure site for the dinner—though the White House does not host it—and said that he wanted a do-over within thirty days. He’d reportedly hired joke writers to help him roast the press but, he said, “I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight.”
Related Knowledge Center: The White House vs. the press
Whether it’s the Des Moines Register’s publication of an unfavorable election poll, a routine edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, or the Associated Press’s decision in its authoritative stylebook to continue to use “Gulf of Mexico,” Donald Trump and the White House have used executive authority and legal reprisals in an effort to punish and suppress press coverage that runs contrary to the administration’s preferred narratives.
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