The White House Correspondents' Association Just Showed Us How Easily Journalists Break
Back in February, the White House Correspondents’ Association announced that comedian Amber Ruffin would headline their annual dinner on April 26. WHCA president Eugene Daniels was enthusiastic about the choice, saying Ruffin “has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day.” The selection would have made Ruffin only the second Black female comedian to perform at the prestigious event, after Wanda Sykes in 2009.
Fast forward to this past Saturday, when the WHCA abruptly announced that Ruffin was out — and in fact, there would be no comedian at all. The official reason? Daniels claimed he wants to “ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work.” What noble-sounding bullshit.
The Present Age is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
What actually happened: Ruffin appeared on a Daily Beast podcast and referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” and said she wouldn’t be giving equal comedic treatment to “both sides” because, well, there aren’t two equal sides here.
This prompted White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich to call Ruffin a “2nd rate comedian” and question what “responsible, sensible journalist would attend something like this?” Just one day later, the WHCA unanimously voted to cancel the comedy portion of the dinner entirely.
Capitulation doesn’t get more obvious than this.
Remember when Michelle Wolf performed in 2018 and had the audacity to joke about Sarah Huckabee Sanders? The pearl-clutching was immediate, and by the next year, the WHCA had replaced the comedian with historian Ron Chernow. The pattern is crystal clear: the moment a presidential administration (especially one with an authoritarian bent) gets slightly uncomfortable, journalists fold faster than a lawn chair in a hurricane.
Ruffin hasn’t taken this lying down. On “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” she mockingly responded to her firing by saying she’d learned her lesson: “When bad people do bad things, you have to treat them fairly and respectfully. When you watch ‘The Sound of Music,’ you have to root for the singing children, and the other people.” When Meyers asked if she meant the Nazis, Ruffin quipped, “Calling them that is so one-sided.”
This capitulation is especially troubling when you consider the broader context of Trump’s second term and his administration’s handling of the press. They’ve banned the Associated Press from White House events, seized control of press pool assignments from the WHCA, and ordered government entities to cancel news subscriptions. The administration is methodically dismantling press freedoms, and the WHCA response is to… cancel their comedian when the White House complains?
As Daniel D’Addario rightly pointed out in Variety, this shows how quickly institutions bow to pressure from this White House as it attempts “to govern how all of us may speak.” What’s so frustrating is how the WHCA is pretending this is about maintaining some kind of journalistic integrity or avoiding “the politics of division,” when in reality, it’s pure cowardice.
Let’s not forget what the WHCA dinner is supposed to be about: celebrating the First Amendment and the importance of a free press that can speak truth to power. Yet here we are, with the very organization that should be defending free speech falling over itself to silence criticism of an administration actively working to undermine press freedom.
If journalists — the people whose entire professional existence is predicated on the First Amendment — won’t stand up for free speech, who will?
Maybe we should take this moment to reconsider whether the White House Correspondents’ Dinner should exist at all.
For all the high-minded talk about celebrating journalism and the First Amendment, what this event has actually become is a grotesque spectacle where reporters rub elbows with the very politicians they’re supposed to be holding accountable, all while Hollywood celebrities float around to add an extra layer of absurdity to the whole affair.
How are journalists supposed to maintain any semblance of objectivity or critical distance when they’re sharing champagne and laughing at inside jokes with administration officials one night, then turning around and covering those same officials the next day? The entire setup creates an appearance of coziness that undermines public trust in the press.
Let’s not kid ourselves about what this dinner really is: it’s an exercise in elite back-scratching that only serves to reinforce the public’s perception that journalists are part of the same privileged class as politicians. It’s the ultimate insider party, with the press pretending they’re not complicit in a system they claim to objectively cover.
The dinner is already taking place amid tense relations between the WHCA and the White House, so why bother maintaining this charade of collegiality at all? If the WHCA truly cared about defending press freedom and journalistic integrity, they’d spend less time planning galas and more time fighting against the administration’s systematic dismantling of press access.
The Amber Ruffin fiasco is just the latest symptom of a much deeper problem: American journalism’s chronic failure to stand firm against power in favor of appearing “balanced.” And until news organizations rediscover their backbone, expect more capitulation, more self-censorship, and more erosion of the very freedoms they claim to celebrate at their fancy dinner.