On Saturday night—following three blissful years without one and weeks of over-the-top media hype about its return—the White House Correspondents’ Dinner made its post-covid comeback. President Biden spoke—a departure, we were told far too many times, from his predecessor’s no-shows—as did The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, the first comedian to host the event since Michelle Wolf’s (barely) edgy 2018 speech offended the prim sensibilities of many White House reporters. Both men made jokes about the pandemic, amid other targets. “This is the first time a president attended this dinner in six years,” Biden said. “We had a horrible plague followed by two years of covid.” Noah said he was honored to be hosting “the nation’s most distinguished superspreader event,” before asking “did none of you learn anything from the Gridiron Dinner? The second someone offers you a free dinner you all turn into Joe Rogan.”
The covid context was always likely to loom large, but the aforementioned Gridiron event, which itself returned from a three-year hiatus in early April (and is even yuckier than the Correspondents’ Dinner), supercharged matters; more than eighty guests subsequently tested positive, including numerous reporters. Last week, Anthony Fauci—Biden’s top covid adviser, who attended the Gridiron—decided to skip the Correspondents’ Dinner, citing a personal risk calculation. (“Fauci thought it was too dangerous to come tonight,” Noah said onstage. “Pete Davidson thinks it’s okay, and we all went with Pete.”) All this raised questions as to whether the Correspondents’ Dinner should be canceled or whether Biden ought to go, and under what circumstances; some health experts said that his attendance would be overly risky given his responsibility to the nation to stay healthy, though others were more positive about his presence and the event in general, arguing that Biden should show Americans how to live alongside the virus. Ultimately, the organizers strengthened their rules to demand a same-day negative test as well as proof of vaccination (they turned down a chance to install germicidal UV lights), while Biden wore a mask when he wasn’t talking and took a pass on the “eating portion” of the event.
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Like Noah, Biden addressed the debate around holding the Correspondents’ Dinner at the dinner itself. “I know there are questions about whether we should gather here tonight because of covid,” he said. “Well, we’re here to show the country that we’re getting through this pandemic.” Apparently, members of his administration have recently sounded far less sanguine behind the scenes following a spike in reported covid cases, both nationally and in Washington, where several high-profile politicians have been affected. The cabinet secretaries Merrick Garland, Gina Raimondo, and Tom Vilsack all tested positive post-Gridiron (as, a week later, did Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City); last week, Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, and, most notably, Vice President Kamala Harris both reported cases. All said that they had mild or no symptoms. Headlines and push alerts about their diagnoses rained down regardless.
After the Gridiron, in particular, this type of coverage irked the White House: according to Alexander Nazaryan, of Yahoo News, officials saw reporters’ “focus on a handful of largely asymptomatic cases among members of the political elite” as coming at the expense of a much more important story about the administration’s requests for more covid funds stalling out in Congress, with the White House calculating that Jen Psaki, the press secretary, faced fewer than half as many questions about funding (ten) in the entire first week of April as about safety protocols around Biden (twenty-one) at a single briefing on April 7. At the same briefing, Psaki frustratedly waved around the administration’s pandemic preparedness plan and offered reporters a copy. Around the same time, she did likewise with a thick binder detailing how past covid funds were spent, amid Republican complaints about a lack of transparency. Stat’s Rachel Cohrs said that she was the only reporter to take Psaki up on her offer. When she did so, officials refused her a copy, instead allowing her an hour with the binder under supervision.
This, obviously, was intensely hypocritical. More generally, covid infections among senior officials are newsworthy—isolation affects their duties and covid remains a dangerous disease, especially for unvaccinated, immunocompromised, and older people; take these factors together, and Biden’s exposure clearly matters. Debates like the one around whether, and how, to hold the Correspondents’ Dinner, meanwhile, can feed into more broadly relevant societal conversations about risk calculations at this stage of the pandemic.
Often, though, the tenor of such coverage—and, particularly where the Correspondents’ Dinner has been concerned, its volume—has been disproportionate, sometimes absurdly so. A powerful person getting infected isn’t necessarily that big a story if their symptoms aren’t debilitating and, as has been the case with the names in the spotlight recently, they are vaccinated, sometimes quadruply so; we’re nowhere near the level, so far, of the time Trump went to the hospital in 2020. More importantly, and more to the White House’s post-Gridiron gripe, focusing on elites can lessen focus elsewhere—in this case, on funding interventions, from testing to vaccines, that are urgently needed by medically vulnerable people in particular, both in the US and globally. Throughout the pandemic, media coverage has often, if by no means always, framed avoiding infection as a matter of personal responsibility. This approach has always been deeply flawed, and it remains so. As federal covid funds dry up, programs that have supported hospitals and the uninsured are withering. The idea that the Correspondents’ Dinner is in any way more important than that is shameful.
We have seen plenty of coverage of the funding stakes. Much of it, though, has focused on Washington politicking at the expense of the bigger picture. At this (hopefully) late stage of the pandemic, the press shouldn’t be limiting our lens to the scope of congressional will, but rather working to convene a much broader debate not only around covid, but healthcare policy more generally, not least the urgent need to end medical racism and the many other glaring inequities and flaws in the system. Again, some journalists are working to do this; yesterday morning, to cite just one example, a story about funding for the uninsured was higher up the New York Times’ homepage than the Correspondents’ Dinner. But it’s hard to conclude that this has added up to an urgent, agenda-shaping national conversation. Other big stories, not least the war in Ukraine, have recently sapped much of our bandwidth on that front, and that’s understandable. But it also underscores just how few distractions we can collectively afford to indulge—and “distraction” is a perfect word for the Correspondents’ Dinner.
Not all of the coverage of the dinner was elitist; Axios’s Paige Hopkins, among others, drew attention to the disparity in covid requirements between guests and the staff members serving them, flipping the script to shine a light on one close-to-home example of covid inequality. Much of the dinner discourse, though, was circus-like and incestuous. Of course, as I and many others have written before, the dinner didn’t need covid to come along to be accused of that; as the Democratic strategist turned pundit David Axelrod told the Times ahead of the event, “there is a question of whether it’s EVER appropriate to engage in an exercise in gaudy, celebrity-drenched self-adulation.” Axelrod added that this was “a separate question”—but actually it isn’t. It’s painfully consistent for a media ecosystem that treats a DC schmoozefest as really mattering to treat the many victims of America’s healthcare system as if they don’t.
Like Wolf in 2018, Noah had some serious words for the press on Saturday, amid all the jokes. “In America you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth, even if it makes people in power uncomfortable—even if it makes your viewers or your readers uncomfortable,” he said, before pivoting to the war in Ukraine. “Ask yourself this question: If Russian journalists…had the freedom to write any words, to show any stories, or to ask any questions—if they had basically what you have—would they be using it in the same way that you do?” The immediate context here may have been different, but covid, again, was not a separate question.
Below, more on the Correspondents’ Dinner, covid, and the White House:
- Biden v. Fox: After Biden acknowledged the debate about the safety of the dinner in his speech, he referenced the vaccination requirement for entry, and then tweaked Fox News, telling viewers that if they were wondering how to get vaccinated and boosted they should “just contact your favorite Fox News reporter. They’re all here, vaccinated and boosted—all of them.” Yesterday, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a Fox personality, hit back, saying that she didn’t go to the dinner because (among “many” other reasons) she is unvaccinated, before pointing to her colleague Pete Hegseth and noting that he isn’t vaccinated either. Biden’s remark, she said, was “not true” and “so ironic.”
- Vaccines for young kids: On Friday, David Leonhardt, of the Times, took aim at the federal government for creating confusion around its failure to approve a covid vaccine for children under five, with officials variously pinning the decision on themselves and vaccine manufacturers. “Parents listen to the public statements of government officials and the news coverage but fail to find comprehensible answers,” Leonhardt wrote. “The confusion has become one more factor contributing to Americans’ distrust of major institutions like the government, the media and the medical system.”
- Staffing news: Sarah Mucha, of Axios, reported last week that Pili Tobar, the deputy White House communications director, is leaving the administration to take a job in the private sector. “At the White House, Tobar managed a communications portfolio that included immigration, climate and LGBTQI+ issues, among others,” while serving as “a bilingual spokesperson in Spanish,” Mucha writes. “Tobar joined the White House from the Biden campaign, where she led the coalitions communications team.”
Other notable stories:
- Late last week, Vira Hyrych, a journalist with the Ukrainian arm of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US-funded broadcaster, was killed when a Russian missile hit the building where she lived in Kyiv. Elsewhere, Ukraine’s government acknowledged that the “ghost of Kyiv”—a moniker bestowed on a fighter pilot said to have prolifically downed Russian planes in the early days of the war—was a myth, after various Western outlets identified him as a real person. And Politico’s Zoya Sheftalovich spoke with Marina Ovsyannikova, the former Russian state TV staffer who spoke out against the war on air, and has since faced speculation that she did so as part of a Kremlin plot.
- Nicholas Confessore, of the Times, is out with a three–part series examining the influence of Tucker Carlson, who has “constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news—and also, by some measures, the most successful.” Carlson “has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas,” Confessore writes. He has also become Fox’s “most influential employee,” answering “solely to the Murdochs themselves.” (ICYMI, read Lyz Lenz’s CJR profile of Carlson.)
- Nackey Gallowhur Scagliotti told the New Hampshire Union Leader that her stepfather, William Loeb, the paper’s influential late publisher, molested her when she was a young child and also sexually abused his daughter Edie Tomasko. Scagliotti, who is now seventy-six, said that she decided to speak out after Joseph W. McQuaid, another former Union Leader publisher, wrote a biography of Loeb; in response, the current leadership of the Union Leader stripped Loeb’s name from the paper’s masthead.
- Months after Netflix wooed journalists to work for Tudum, a new editorial product aimed at boosting its content, the streamer laid some of them off; according to NPR’s Mandalit del Barco, between ten and twelve staffers were affected, many of them women of color. Some of those who were laid off noted “that when Netflix approached them, they were told that this would be a different, more stable kind of job,” Vice’s Gita Jackson writes.
- For Teen Vogue, Mary Retta spoke with student journalists who have been sued over their reporting, or otherwise faced censorship. “Student journalists, especially at the middle and high school levels, are not afforded the same constitutional protections for free speech that professional journalists are,” Stephanie Sugars, of the US Press Freedom Tracker, told Retta, with schools often subjecting their work to prior review.
- On Friday, a federal judge in the US sentenced Alexanda Kotey, a British isis terrorist, to life in prison after he pleaded guilty to involvement in the kidnappings and murders of the journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as the aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig. El Shafee Elsheikh, a militant from the same cell as Kotey who was convicted by a US jury last month, is scheduled to be sentenced in August.
- CJR’s Paroma Soni reports on a deadly few months for the press in Mexico, where at least eight journalists have been killed so far in 2022. “When so many of our colleagues and friends die, we never get the time to cry, to have catharsis,” Gaby Martínez, whose friend and colleague Margarito Martínez Esquivel was among those killed, told Soni. “We have to continue doing the work so someday we don’t have to cry anymore.”
- After a British lawmaker acknowledged watching pornography twice in the House of Commons (he said that the first time was accidental as he searched for a website about tractors, but admitted that the second time was deliberate), Charlotte Ivers, a political staffer turned journalist, wrote for the Sunday Times about sexual harassment in Parliament. The problem “is not about sex,” Ivers writes. “It is about power.”
- And thirty years after four LA police officers were acquitted of assaulting Rodney King, leading to unrest in the city, Héctor Tobar, then a young reporter at the LA Times, reflected for the New York Times on covering the story. “It felt to many reporters of color at the time that we had been sent out to report in an urban war zone,” Tobar writes, “while a mostly white staff of editors shaped what actually appeared in the newspaper.”
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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.