CBS White House correspondent Major Garrett wrote an op-ed for Sunday’s Washington Post imploring journalists not to skip the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The headline was "Skipping 'nerd prom' now would prove Trump right" -- that journalists hate him too strongly to sit through a dinner with him.
Garrett also pushed back against the Post’s own Margaret Sullivan, who argued that it would be appropriate to cancel the event altogether because the press should not be Mr. Trump’s “prom date.”
"But no self-respecting White House reporter has ever been a president’s prom date, and the dinner isn’t a date at all,” Garrett writes. “It’s a cease-fire with bad wine and crowded tables. And if we, the media, stand Trump up at the proverbial dance because we’re pining for another ‘date,’ we make it that much easier for him to say we’re playing favorites. And in this case, at least, he’d be right."
Garrett decried decidedly non-objective media outlets -- which, by the way, don't have White House correspondents in the Brady briefing room -- taking their ball and going home:
When asked why his outlet won’t be co-sponsoring its always well-attended WHCA dinner after-party this year (and why he says he’s going fishing instead), Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told The New York Times that his reasons were “Trump” and “the fish.” The New Yorker is scrapping its own, very popular, correspondents’ dinner weekend kickoff party, as well. U.S. News & World Report’s Robert Schlesinger says “The media should go all the way and boycott the dinner entirely this year.”
....Holding the dinner does not confer respect on any president. It aligns one institution, the WHCA, with another, the American presidency. If the dinner were canceled because (gasp!) a president made a few snide remarks about White House reporters, that act of self-regard would say that the First Amendment is negotiable and that emotional well-being takes precedence over professional responsibilities.
As the Post explained in the credit line at the article's bottom, Garrett has been a board member of the White House Correspondents Association. His position is that "consistency matters."
Consistency matters. The New York Times, among other organizations, has for several years chosen to ignore the dinner. Fair enough. Reasonable journalists can disagree. The suggestion, though, that holding the dinner during the Trump era would be an act of debasement, or that the advent of the Trump administration is the right moment to do away with the event altogether, strikes me as precisely the wrong approach. My outlet, CBS News, will participate this year and proudly so. If they back out now, organizations that attended last year ought to explain what is different about this year. Is it Trump? Or is it them? Skipping needlessly hands an evidentiary cudgel to Trump and his acolytes that reporters cannot and will not cover his presidency objectively.
Trump backers would think attendance at the dinner is a very small signal of hostile coverage. There's so much hostile coverage, who needs a dinner to prove it?
Lastly, if "consistency matters," Garrett should explain why George W. Bush was trashed by Stephen Colbert, but Obama gets Wanda Sykes kissing up, or Seth Meyers tag-teaming his attack on Donald Trump. Let's not forget Keegan-Michael Key helping Obama look funny. The proof is already obvious: the WHCA dinner in the Obama years underlined the press were on a prom date with a guy they deeply adored.
