The Correspondents' Dinner Has Always Been Weird

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was cut short this past weekend by yet another assassination attempt against President Trump.

Details are still coming in, so instead of commenting directly on that, I’m thinking about the event itself. Even in a normal year, it’s a strange tradition in American politics.

This is the first Correspondents’ Dinner that Donald Trump has attended as president. Of course, it resurfaces memories of President Obama’s roast of Trump at the event in 2011, and then raises the following question: why would Trump have attended this event, supposedly about journalists, in the first place?

As Matt Taibbi put it to me a few weeks ago, you’ve got “supposedly gritty, hardened reporters wearing tuxedos with Hollywood actresses on their arm, laughing at unfunny jokes by every president.”

At a certain point, journalism stops looking like a profession and starts to look more like a social class.

Taibbi recalled growing up the son of a journalist, back when the job was just another trade like plumbing or carpentry.

“You go out, you ask some questions, you find out some stuff, you try your best to get to what you think happened, you tell the public, then you go home, crack a beer, forget about it, move on to the next thing.”

He described it in unromantic terms. The job was never an ideological crusade obsessed with “moral clarity.”

“If I’m coming to a subject for the first time today, the best I can do by Wednesday or Thursday is give you a little bit of something that might be true. So you try hard to get it right but you don’t have the arrogance to be absolutely sure.”

That posture has largely been replaced by unearned certainty, or at least the projection of it. Today, it’s not about telling people the facts. It’s about telling them what conclusion to draw and how they should feel about it. The audience can’t be trusted to work things out on its own.

The Wilsonian Takeover

There are two branches of progressive thought as I see it, and they help to illuminate the decay in journalism.

One branch is the populism of William Jennings Bryan, a bottom-up skepticism of concentrated power. It’s the belief that government can be used to counter the perceived abuses of corporate power. In practice, you usually end up with new flavors of public-private corruption, but at least it’s more or less an honest attempt to defend the sovereignty of the individual.

Then you have the Woodrow Wilson types. These credentialed, scientific elites believe that, in a technologically advanced society, the average rube doesn’t have the knowledge or capacity to understand the complexities of the world and navigate the ever-growing waves of information.

You usually hear more of the former on the campaign trail, and more of the latter behind closed doors. Telling your voters that you think they’re dumb doesn’t usually go over well.

Fortunately for us, our betters sometimes say the quiet part out loud. NPR CEO Katherine Maher put it all out there in her TED Talk when she said, “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” Dealing with the plain truth is, unfortunately, an obstacle to Progress™, which must always come first.

Once you believe that, you see the whole world differently. You now can justify filtering the public’s access to information. You now see certain kinds of speech as harmful by definition. Disagreement becomes a threat to be neutralized.

The Correspondents’ Dinner, in that context, isn’t just an awkward tradition. It’s a reminder to the viewers at home of who’s really in charge.

The mainstream journalist class certainly has no favor for the current administration, so it isn’t exactly an arm of the state. But it also isn’t made up of independent-minded, hard-nosed investigators, chasing down facts for their own sake.

In reality, they’re the propaganda arm of elite progressivism. Even when they aren’t particularly wealthy, they are a mainstay of elite circles. Their annual black-tie ritual may be self-congratulatory nonsense, but their power is real.

They convinced half the country that Russia installed a puppet in the White House. They convinced young people that the world has twelve years left (or whatever the latest doomsday prediction is) before climate change ends it all. Were these ever well-established facts? No, but as Stephen Colbert summed it up in his own Correspondents’ Dinner monologue, “reality has a well known liberal bias.”

President Trump is known to play fast-and-loose with the facts and has his own record of thuggish attacks on free speech, usually for stupid personal reasons. But the sustained false narratives that we’ve paid the highest prices for, accompanied by a highly-engineered system to “de-amplify” dissent, overwhelmingly align with elite progressivism.

That’s Not America

Historian Gordon Wood describes the American founding as a kind of doubling down on individual liberty: the British were radicals compared to continental Europe, and the Americans were radicals compared to the British. Funnily enough, the original “free speech wing of the free speech party” ethos of Twitter echoed the same idea.

The foundational values of America never depended on perfect agreement. Your neighbors’ lawn signs might piss you off every morning, but it would never cross your mind to deny them that right. The point was that we all operated under the same set of rules.

Wilsonian elitism doesn’t leave room for a level playing field. It assumes superiors and inferiors, and when conflicts arise, we know who wins. That’s not how America is supposed to work.

As Taibbi put it, “In the United States, we assume that citizens are adults and that they can handle truth and information.”

I still believe that adults can handle the truth, but it’s hard to say that “we” share that belief anymore.

Elon Musk restored the founding values of Twitter for the low price of $44 billion. What price are we willing to pay for the rest of America?