Lapel Pins and Pocket Squares with an inscribed 1st Amendment were worn by some journalists at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner one month ago today. It was not exactly a “speaking truth to power” moment - more like a Miss Manners whisper to a raging WWE - a mismatch between Pinky’s Up and Pummeling Paul with a captivated audience engaged in the suspension of disbelief.
I am certain this was not what seasoned journalists Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson had in mind when they, along with 200+ journalists signed an open letter imploring those correspondents attending the dinner, to call out the administration’s attacks on freedom of the press and defend the 1st Amendment – to not treat this dinner as business as usual. And it wasn’t.
Because then came the shooting incident; that canceled the dinner; that brought on the press conference; that inspired the president’s articulation of percentages of peril presidents face compared to race car drivers and bullfighters, shifting the evening’s purpose from celebrating journalism to moralizing martyrdom.
The dinner was canceled but promises to reschedule were spoken with the optics of intention. It’s been a month and the priority seems to have faded, eclipsed by the accelerated news cycle. Attacks on free speech resulting in protesters’ lives threatened and terminated a few months ago, are now in the rearview mirror. I doubt that would have come up at the dinner anyway - because attacks on free speech don’t cancel dinners about free speech, though it certainly puts a damper on them, and leaves us kinda speechless.
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