Correspondents' Dinner Roast Foreshadowed Late-Night Firings
The end of the White House Correspondents' Dinner roast of the president heralded the end of free speech.
In 2017, Trump became the first president to skip the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 36 years and is the only president to not have attended a single one while in office (apart from Harding, who essentially founded the dinner). What was true in 2017 is not only true now but also weaponized: Trump can’t take a joke.
I never paid much attention to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Like most people, I’d catch the highlights afterward of the comedian du jour roasting a sitting president. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it was harsh. Sometimes it hit the nail on the head. It took a minute of my day. Many found it hacky. Others thought it was pointless. Lately, I find myself thinking about that dinner.
The White House Correspondents’ Association formed in the crucible of protest. Feeling betrayed after off-the-record remarks were published, President Woodrow Wilson threatened to end news conferences, which would effectively cut public access to the goings-on of the presidency. Members of the White House press corps banded together as the WHCA to oppose Wilson’s threat. It didn’t work. A year later, Wilson canceled his news conferences for the next five and a half years. The next president, Warren G. Harding, a newspaper publisher, extended an olive branch to the press corps by throwing them a party: the first White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 1921.
The inaugural dinner, then, was a symbol of harmony, or at least a detente, which I find amusing given that in my lifetime it served a different function, for the public, that is. The dinner—specifically the televised roast portion—gave the public an opportunity to vent our collective frustrations with the president vicariously through the host. A joke that made a president squirm felt like retribution. When done right, the host of the Correspondents’ Dinner was the public’s messenger.
Therein lies the symbolic significance of the Correspondents’ Dinner roast of the president. It was a reminder that the President of the United States is not king. We can make fun of presidents. We can laugh at them. We can criticize them. The White House Correspondents’ Association came together as a reminder of what the president owes the public. The roast is an extension of that ethos. You might be the most powerful politician in the country, but you still have to shave, shower, comb your hair, put on an uncomfortable tux, and drag your fat ass to an event where you’ll have to take shit from people with a smile on your face. It’s a forced act of humility. The roast knocks the president down a peg, and that’s a good thing.
Making fun of the president today is a dangerous proposition. Jimmy Kimmel’s Charlie Kirk comments served as ABC’s pretext for firing him, but do you know the real reason Kimmel was fired? Years of making fun of Trump. How do I know? Trump makes no secret of his longstanding grudges, having now set his sights on remaining late-night hosts:
Side note: I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on the quality of Trump’s post, which reads like it was written by a petulant child. We’ve come to accept this manner of communication, riddled with low-brow insults and baseless accusations, because he always talks like this, but I refuse to normalize it. This is not how a leader communicates. This is not how any level-headed adult communicates. This is how online trolls and disgruntled tweens communicate. It’s not OK, and it poisons public discourse.
But I digress. The point is, Trump uses his political might to pressure media companies into dismissing those who have criticized or poked fun at him. Most recently, he has harnessed the right-wing hagiography of Charlie Kirk as fuel for his ongoing feuds.
sums up the phenomenon perfectly in his post, “The Cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel.”
ABC fires Jimmy Kimmel for mocking Trump.
CBS fires Stephen Colbert for mocking Trump.
ABC also fires Terry Moran for slamming Stephen Miller.
MSNBC fires Matt Dowd for daring to say “hateful thoughts lead to hateful actions.”
The Trump regime guts the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is now replacing it with right wing propaganda media
The Washington Post fires
for tweeting literal verbatim quotes from Charlie Kirk—quotes that were racist on their face.
And the list goes on and on.
You know who behaves like this? Dictators. Putin sent his goons to arrest Vladimir Gusinsky, the founder of NTV, the country’s only independent TV network at the time. The purported crime? Theft. The actual crime? A puppet show that made fun of Putin.
Those who fulminated against so-called “cancel culture” are pin-drop-in-a-library-at-midnight quiet about the ever-growing list of comedians and journalists canceled for speaking ill of Trump. Where is the outrage for cancel culture now that it’s actually happening? Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to “cancel” racists and misogynists than people who criticize a racist and misogynist.
As citizens of a democratic republic, we have a right—nay, a responsibility—to criticize our leaders. In a working republic, leaders represent the will of the people. Sometimes, they shirk that duty, so it’s important to keep them honest. That’s why a robust fourth estate is critical. Humor and satire perform similar functions, but with a bite. All speak truth to power.
One could argue, then, that the strength of a democracy can be measured by our freedom to criticize, satirize, and otherwise make fun of our leaders. If that’s the case, our democracy ain’t looking too good, what with veteran journalists canceled for doing their jobs and late-night hosts dropping faster than court jesters in the Middle Ages.