Infinite Jest

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All this week, CJR is running a series of pieces, on our website and in this newsletter, on the fog of news and propaganda that has marked the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term as president. First up this morning: Kyle Paoletta reports on how the press and civil society groups are strategizing to gain access to records from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. You can read the piece here.  

In early February, Eugene Daniels, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, announced that Amber Ruffin would be the featured comedian at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Amber’s unique talents are the ideal fit for this current political and cultural climate,” Daniels said. “This dinner is about centering the importance of a functioning democracy and Amber is the type of entertainer who understands both the significance of that mission as well as the mechanics of power in this country.” Late last month, however, Ruffin was cut, and Daniels sounded a very different note: “At this consequential moment for journalism,” he said, “I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division.” What changed? In the interim, relations between the White House and the press corps that covers it had soured, not least after officials banned the Associated Press from various settings; Ruffin, for her part, went on a podcast, referred to the administration as “kinda a bunch of murderers,” and suggested that she wouldn’t mock both political sides evenhandedly in her dinner appearance (as the WHCA had apparently requested), drawing the ire of the White House. The WHCA insisted that the pushback had nothing to do with its decision to cut Ruffin, but faced accusations of cowardice regardless. “I thought when people take away your rights, erase your history, and deport your friends, you’re supposed to call it out, but I was wrong,” Ruffin said afterward. “We have a free press so that we can be nice to Republicans at fancy dinners.”

On the subject of jokes, a few weeks later, we learned that guests at the dinner wouldn’t get to hear the one about ending the war in Ukraine on day one, either—the administration confirmed that Trump wouldn’t be in attendance. This wasn’t the first time that a comedian and the comedian-in-chief would both be absent from the dinner—Trump routinely refused to show up the first time he was in office; in 2019, the WHCA decided against having a comedian after Michelle Wolf took the stage the year before and (for some reason controversially) skewered the administration, leading Wolf, too, to accuse the organization of cowardice—but this time, we didn’t even get the Hamilton guy as a substitute. (Times, truly, have changed.) “It’s just us,” Daniels told the journalists in the room as the dinner, restyled as a celebration of the First Amendment, finally took place on Saturday. “I wanna be clear about something: we don’t invite presidents of the United States to this because it’s for them. We don’t invite them because we wanna cozy up to them or curry favor,” he added. “We don’t only extend invites to the presidents who say they love journalists or who say they are defenders of the…free press. We invite them to remind them that they should be.”

Critics of the dinner—and there are many—would quibble with the idea that it isn’t an annual opportunity to cozy up to the powerful; at the very least, the fact that it looks like it might be has often been cited as grounds to kill it. (I made such a call in 2019, post–Wolf fiasco, and have since complained about the dinner’s very real whiff of out-of-touch elitism.) Indeed, the debate over the dinner is as much an annual tradition as the dinner itself—and yet, while there were murmurings of it this year, the usual argument, like the presence of a comedian, seemed to become a casualty of the tensions that formed the backdrop to the dinner: “The entirely new and sort of chilling thing” about this year’s dinner, Evan McMorris-Santoro, of NOTUS, wrote ahead of time, “is that hardly anyone is arguing about it at all.” This isn’t to say that the usual weekend of swanky parties didn’t happen—it did—but one journalist told Politico on Friday that “the vibe is more serious” than in years past, adding, “It feels like people are looking for a reason to be together. It sounds cheesy, but folks seem to be holding on a little bit longer in hugs.” Dispatches about the dinner itself described it, variously, as “muted,” “stripped down,” “relatively solemn,” “sober,” “somber,” “subdued,” and “in many ways over before it began.” According to the New York Times, news outlets found it “nearly impossible” to get celebrities to join their tables. “This is a dinner that once attracted the likes of George Clooney and Steven Spielberg,” the paper wrote, but “it seemed as if the most au courant actor in town was Jason Isaacs, the Englishman who played the dad on the latest edition of The White Lotus, and whose character spent the season fantasizing about a murder-suicide.” (Thanks for the spoiler.)

A handful of relatively low-profile Trump sympathizers showed up, but mostly, MAGA-world counterprogrammed the dinner with events of its own. Trump himself, as it happened, ended up being busy with the pope’s funeral; this, of course, was not counterprogramming in any intentional sense, but the administration and outside boosters seized shamelessly on the opportunity to draw a contrast: a White House official accused the “corporate media” of “quite literally fiddling away as Rome mourns” (thus abusing the phrase “quite literally,” unless I missed Daniels’s violin solo; Steve Bannon said that Trump was “transformed from leader of the free world to the leader of Christendom while media elites bore themselves at interminable parties.” Not that MAGA elites are above an interminable party. Bannon himself cohosted a bash titled (somewhat disingenuously) “The Uninvited,” at which, per Politico, guests “sipped cocktails dubbed the ‘FAKE NEWS FIZZ’ and ‘LEAKERS AND LIARS,’” and “held cocktail napkins that read ‘NOT THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ ASSOCIATION.’” (Per the Washington Post, Bannon ultimately skipped the event due to illness.) Nor are they above out-of-touch elitism: also over the weekend, Trump’s son Don Jr. and a bunch of donor and investor types formally launched “The Executive Branch,” an exclusive DC club whose members will pay extortionate dues for the privilege of “mingling with Trump advisers and cabinet members without the prying eyes of the press,” according to Politico’s Dasha Burns. The launch coinciding with the correspondents’ dinner was no accident, Burns reported. The split screen demonstrated that “the two camps”—administration officials and journalists—“will stay with their own kind.”

Indeed, reports of the weekend’s scenes seemed to underscore a dynamic that has defined the first hundred or so days of the new administration’s relationship with the mainstream press—one of sharp, often contemptuous rupture. Sometimes, physical separation has been key to this dynamic, not least in the case of the AP ban. But this hasn’t always been the case: as numerous recent reports have explored, the rupture has also played out amid the swarm of the White House briefing room, where Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, has continued to take questions from major news organizations but also called increasingly on personalities from right-wing outlets who, often, pitch softball questions or bash the MSM. (Even here, there has been a degree of physical separation, with right-wing journalists often lining the sides of the room while more established outlets continue to claim seats; it has been suggested that the White House might soon shake this up, too.) The current tension between the White House press shop and reporters “goes beyond anything that is traditional to the point of open hostility, and mockery and disparagement in a way that’s meant for the larger audience, not for the people in the room,” Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the Times, told Politico recently. “They don’t view the briefing room as a way to impart information. They don’t even view the briefing room as a way to shape reporters’ stories. They view the briefing room as a theater for the MAGA audience.” 

The theatricality might, to no small extent, be the point of the wider rupture, too; other data points exist that suggest as much, and that the reality below the surface may be less absolutely conflictual than the performance indicates. The new pro-MAGA personalities in the briefing room may preach disdain for mainstream reporters, but at least some of them seem perfectly happy to be profiled by such outlets (“I don’t even recognize myself,” one told the Times, tellingly, over dinner, of their combative on-screen persona); at least some of those mainstream reporters are “friendly with Leavitt interpersonally behind the scenes,” even if they fear what the administration might do to the press corps; a recent Atlantic profile of Steven Cheung—Leavitt’s even more combative boss—relayed “nearly a dozen reporters from outlets across the ideological spectrum” describing him “as a uniquely pleasant and straightforward aide in Trump’s mostly toxic orbit.” As I noted last week, administration sources are clearly still talking to mainstream outlets, which continue to break major scoops about what Trump is doing, as Paul Farhi pointed out in Vanity Fair last week. These include Trump himself: to mark his hundred days in office, he has done or is doing interviews with, at minimum, Time, ABC, and The Atlantic. “Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday, referring to The Atlantic’s editor. “I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’ Are they capable of writing a fair story on ‘TRUMP’?” If Trump was really as surprised as he sounded by this turn of events, he was the only one.

And yet the fear and toxicity are clearly very real. Even if the White House were purely performing a hostility to independent journalism, that would have concrete consequences, nourishing distrust in our work to serve a political purpose. And what we have seen so far—in the entire Trump era, but especially in this early part of his second term—is far from that: just ask journalists at the AP, Voice of America, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, practically every student newspaper in the country—the list goes on. Worse may be to come. On a podcast published on Friday, Ben Smith, the editor of Semafor, put it to Ezra Klein, the Times columnist—questionably, in light of the above—that Trump’s attacks on the press have so far been “kind of trivial nonsense,” and asked whether Klein expects things to get worse. Thinking from a “WWE perspective,” Trump and his allies understand that they can unlock “an energy” by going into hostile media environments and doing battle, Klein said. Whether they’ll go further depends on what points of leverage they feel they have. “My worries about the way they’ll go after the press honestly have more to do with things like FBI surveillance and things that are darker and more illegal but are very common around the world,” Klein said. “Things like going after leaks and trying to throw people in jail.”

The day the podcast dropped, and just as correspondents’ dinner weekend was getting into full swing, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, reversed Biden-era guidance that prosecutors shouldn’t go after reporters’ phone records or compel them to testify in leak investigations, apart from in exceptional circumstances. (Bondi said in a memo that prosecutors would continue to use “procedural protections” to limit such steps, but according to the Times, her language was vague; the previous Trump administration did on occasion go after reporters’ records.) This was probably the most concerning press-freedom news of the weekend, but it showed up curiously little in the coverage of the dinner that I read; in the articles I linked to above attesting to the somber (and so on) mood, Isaacs’s name came up much more than Bondi’s. The dinner itself did at least serve as a symbolic rebuke to the administration’s mounting press threats: “What we are not is the enemy of the people,” Daniels said, “and what we are not is the enemy of the state.” This was a better free-speech message than chowing down on fancy food with Republicans in the name of some performed comity. Even if Ruffin might have delivered it with more bite.   

Other notable stories:

• Last week, as we noted in this newsletter, Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes on CBS, quit, citing concerns about corporate meddling in editorial matters; Trump is currently suing CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, and even though the suit is groundless, Paramount, the network’s parent company, is reportedly inclined to settle as it seeks the administration’s approval for a corporate merger. Last night, 60 Minutes aired for the first time since the Owens news broke, and Scott Pelley, a senior journalist on the show, rebuked Paramount on air. Owens’s resignation “was hard on him and hard on us. But he did it for us. And you,” Pelley said, before noting that Owens felt he’d lost independence. “In resigning, Bill proved one thing—he was the right person to lead 60 Minutes all along.”

• CBS also made headlines yesterday for an at times excruciating interview with the football coach Bill Belichick that aired on CBS Sunday Morning. The sit-down was pegged to Belichick’s first book, but the interviewer, Tony Dokoupil, also tried to ask him about his relationship with Jordon Hudson, his girlfriend, who is nearly fifty years his junior; Hudson was a “constant presence” during the interview, Dokoupil said, and at one point chimed in to shut down a question about how Belichick met her. According to NBC’s Mike Florio, CBS included the interruption in its package because it wasn’t Hudson’s only interjection. (Belichick also raised eyebrows for wearing a shirt with a hole in it. “You can see I’ve worn this one for a while,” he said.)

• Late last week—ahead of the final of a major soccer tournament in Spain, in which Real Madrid were due to face Barcelona—Ricardo de Burgos Bengoetxea, the match referee, broke down in tears at a press conference, after being asked to respond to a video criticizing his past decision-making on Real’s official TV channel. (“When a child arrives at school and his mates tell him that his father is a thief, it makes you sick,” de Burgos said.) Real defended its channel as “protected by freedom of expression” and demanded that de Burgos be dropped from the match. In the end he wasn’t, Barcelona won, and Real had three players sent off.

• Last year, we noted in this newsletter that Gordon Brown, a former British prime minister, had reported concerns to police in London about Rupert Murdoch’s UK media business mass-deleting emails around the time of a probe into claims of illegal newsgathering practices. Now Brown has made a new criminal complaint against the company after alleging that officers involved in the case expressed concern to him about obstruction of justice. He has also accused Will Lewis—then a Murdoch staffer, now CEO at the Post—of trying to incriminate him. (Lewis has denied wrongdoing.)

• And Vinson Cunningham, a critic at The New Yorker, wrote about the footage of the pope’s funeral on Saturday. “Francis was a TV Pope,” one who wrote beautifully but whose “greater talent was for imbuing images, broadcast everywhere, with the ‘drama and symbolism’ he advised young priests to go searching for in books,” Cunningham writes. It’s possible to view the instructions he left for his funeral “as the meticulous notes of a producer who knew he wouldn’t be there to captain the show.”

Correction: A previous version of this post misstated the date of a Trump social media post.

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