CNN — The White House Correspondents’ Association is reversing course and canceling its plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin headline this year’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington, DC.
Instead, the association says it will celebrate the First Amendment and the free press.
“At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” the association’s president, Eugene Daniels, wrote in a memo Saturday.
He said the association’s board voted unanimously to make the change, and did not immediately announce any new speakers.
The change is a tacit acknowledgment of the growing tensions between the association — which represents White House correspondents from dozens of news outlets — and President Donald Trump.
The event typically features comedians, who often use the forum to roast the guests, particularly those holding office. Presidents have traditionally given light-hearted remarks at the dinner. Last year’s dinner featured remarks by “Saturday Night Live” comedian Colin Jost and then-President Joe Biden, who took jabs at Trump and poked fun at his own age.
Trump skipped the annual dinner during his first four years in office and was expected to snub it again this April.
Some members of the association were privately concerned about the optics of a comedian who is harshly critical of Trump serving as the evening’s entertainment, televised and streamed live in prime time.
It was easy to predict the aftermath — denunciations from the right, free-speech defenses from the left — which is what happened when Trump was roasted by comedian Michelle Wolf in 2018.
The association has been under severe pressure this year as the Trump White House has banned The Associated Press from some events and taken control of press pool assignments, all part of a broader effort to assert power and clamp down on independent news coverage. White House correspondents aren’t exactly in a celebratory mood.
Meanwhile, conservative media outlets aligned with Trump have been planning their own alternative events around the April 26 dinner. Scores of media companies buy tables at the annual dinner, and many hold their own receptions surrounding the event.
Daniels said Saturday that “as the date nears, I will share more details of the plans in place to honor journalistic excellence and a robust, independent media covering the most powerful office in the world.”
Clown Population. The clowns inside the White House are only a small fraction of a total society of mock for mock, reactionary mocking, clowns. The entire nation is a “basket case of clowning around” on social machines / HDTV media machines / mockery.
People like to play a game of psychological denial and say ONLY MAGA is the clowns, only the White House is the clowns. It’s the entire population of Untied States of America.
Fyi, “clown population” isn’t ever going to catch on. Idk how it sounds in your native language but you are not communicating effectively in English.
Seriously. Using “Clown population” in a sentence out loud is like chewing gravel to an English speaker. Your language skills are distracting severely from your message in general, you sound like a buzzword vending machine, but your choice of insult is the most glaringly “doesn’t know how English grammar works”
BTW, “FYI” should be in ALL CAPS, because it is a TLA. “IDK” should also be in all CAPS, it is also a TLA.
You didn’t put a “period” at the end of your sentence. Are you new to English writing or something?
I’m not insulting people. I’m describing the behavior of a population in year 2025. “Group think” and “mob mentality” behaviors. The year 2024 and year 2025 tendency towards “conformity enforcement” via electric media systems and rules / regulations / policies / enforcement. The behavior my nation had in year 2023 is not the same as today in year 2025, there are sort of fashion and style changes in groups of people / societies / mobs / hiveminds / nations. It’s up to people to choose to stop listening to Donald Trump speaking every day and go read a book from Neil Postman that is sitting in the public library. But nothing seems to be able to get people to escape their social media machines and read a paper book about our problems in year 2025. Apple iPhone / iPad is a hell of a drug dealer for Donald Trump content.
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World. The ascent of Donald Trump has proved Neil Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was right. Here’s what we can do about it
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“I view James Joyce’s work as the deepest fiction to address reader literacy problems / oral tradition problems of listening to storybook content ever created. What James Joyce has done with his extremely sophisticated fiction is confront the audience with their own inability to distinguish fiction from non-fiction when encounter poetry that is incredibly charming and appealing. Joyce was disgusted with the state of literacy affairs in Dublin and he labored more than any other person to educate society how to move beyond the non-fiction / fiction crisis.” - Stephen Gutknecht, year 2025
Criticizing me for using complex, appropriate linguistic cultural markers while also acting pissed about prescriptivism. Class, that’s what we call internal inconsistency! Also known as hypocrisy! Seriously, we all know me not using a period was a tone indicator. Be better.
Not that anyone missed that. You’re entire personality is im14andthisisdeep personified. You’re a literal firehose of pseudointellectual drivel
And the fact that you aren’t insulting people is not for any lack of trying on your part. You’re just shit at it. You’re the only person who is buying the lie that you’re just “telling it like it is”. Your utter distain for everyone else drips from every word and you’re not stupid enough to not know that. Which means you’re delusional
And for the record, though your “manifesto” here really doesn’t deserve the effort, you’re an idiot for thinking a “return” to print media of all fucking things is 1) possible, and 2) actually going to solve absolutely anything. And before you jump in I know what you actually meant, but the fact of the matter is all of your ideas are rose tinted, romanticized horseshit. You’ve no actual concept of how the world around you functions, you just think you’re better than everyone around you and if they just acted like you instead everything would be fine.
Social media is a symptom. Trump is a symptom. The media landscape is a symptom. The political landscape is a symptom! And I hate to break it to you kid (again I’m throwing you a bone here pretending you’re young and just have maturing to do. I’m begging you let me sleep better and don’t correct me) but the US in 2023 and the US today are the exact fucking same. Welcome to the real world, sorry it sucks, but this shit isn’t new. It’s start isn’t even in living memory. The only thing new is that you started to pay attention
Live long enough to be embarrassed by how you behaved here.NVM you’re like a trillion years old. ( I mean Jesus, what kind of psycho doxes themselves on their profile like that?) You’re just another selfish liberal boomer who’s been willfully ignorant up until the moment that was literally impossible. I changed my mind. You had your chance to be a good person already and you proved you weren’t. Do us all the favor already. Your generation’s apathy and selfishness are literally the reason all of this is happening. No wonder I thought you were a fucking child. Choke on your rage and drown in your tears you pathetic thief of humanity’s future
No, what you don’t understand is that I’m shit at thinking. I’m shit at writing English. I’m shit because I am drowning in an ocean of shit and came to Lemmy because I’m in on my last leg, barely alive, on my death bed and I can no longer pay for my own website and maintain the servers. My mind is so fucked-up and brain damaged from all the ant-humanism in my home nation, United States of America, I can no longer survive and I wanted my final death-bed words to at least be a warning to other nations about what worship of computer systems and technology can do to a culture.
You think I’m here to insult people because that’s all people do with Internet meme platforms and streaming anti-humanism LOL amusement. Language and discourse was wrecked so long ago you can’t possibly grasp what death-rattle looks like when an individual has exhausted everything they had resisting it.
Or, worse, you are a supporter of the system who found someone weak and barely able to communicate with anyone in any way - and you punch down with your undamaged brain.
No. I don’t think behaving like a brain-damaged person on their death bed would make the world fine.
You and all those who lust for machine technology and mass dehumanization have already won, punching down and dancing on the graves is just your ritual of Lemmy content.
I’m already on my deathbed, I’ve been hospitalized over a dozen times for all the insanity going on in my home nation, United States of America, at the hands of meme networks and meme-thinking and junk worship on social machines. I’ve lost my mind to the mob mentality of Rupert Murdoch’s networks, Elon Musk information systems, Apple Computer consumers, etc.
You are another who worships the spectacle and wants to punch down on those using their very last breath to stand up to the mass dehumanization at the hands of people who lust for technology and machines while cheering on mass dehumanization because people don’t conform to ReTweet values.
Punching down on the weak and brain damaged is incredibly popular, you will go far.
Ahh, playing that I’m not “A Real American” because my English isn’t like Fox News / I sound like “an immigrant” angle. I get that all the time on anonymous social media. I see you joined Lemmy 3 weeks ago, and don’t use your real name.
In other words, if I want to draw the largest crowds in world history, sound like Donald Trump has since year 2014 on social media systems. Gotcha.
“You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox. Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.”
Why don’t you learn how to use English better, come join me over on the Lemmy community for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake lessons? 100 years ago James Joyce addressed English readers like you: [email protected]
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Russia-watcher Catherine Fitzpatrick, who documents Kremlin disinformation for InterpreterMag .com, says just as Moscow uses vague Internet laws to encourage self-censorship, trolls inhibit informed debate by using crude dialogue to change “the climate of discussion.” “If you show up at The Washington Post or New Republic sites, where there’s an article that’s critical of Russia, and you see that there are 200 comments that sound like they were written by 12-year-olds, then you just don’t bother to comment,” she says. “You don’t participate. It’s a way of just driving discussion away completely,” she adds. “Those kinds of tactics are meant to stop democratic debate, and they work.” - year 2014