Before the gunshots rang out at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night, the scene at the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner felt like the Germans marching into Paris in 1940 (Note to self: Watch “Casablanca” this week). After a years-long campaign to bend America’s corporate media to his will, Donald Trump ascended the stage as a conqueror while his authoritarian minions — Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Steven Miller, et al — circulated among the tables, lapping up the obsequiousness of media celebrities who knew they were in the presence of an occupying force.
I won’t delve into the conspiracy theories of whether the assassination attempt was staged, but it’s a pretty sad state of affairs that so many on social media immediately went there…
The bigger story is that the correspondents’ dinner was essentially Trump’s victory lap over the Washington press corps and corporate media. They don’t need to see people falling out of windows to fear his wrath. All that’s needed is a threat from the FCC chairman to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV network affiliates.
After years of boycotting the event because he got his feelings hurt in 2011 when dinner host Seth Meyers and President Obama elicited laughs at his expense, Trump agreed to attend this year, but not without some concessions from the White House Correspondents Association. Chiefly, there would be no comedian host. Trump would be the only one making fun of people, as White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt alluded to beforehand in a very prophetic interview…
Before the dinner, there was debate among members of the media about whether to attend the event. Former MSNBC host Katie Phang posted this on Bluesky shortly before all hell broke loose:
Most of us are familiar with the ways corporate media have capitulated to Trump. Media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote an excellent Substack last July on this topic. Here are a few examples where these craven corporations bent the knee:
Paramount, which owns CBS, paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit in which Trump claimed “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Kamala Harris to put her in a more favorable light.
After Stephen Colbert criticized Paramount during his monologue for settling the lawsuit, Colbert’s show was cancelled.
ABC paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit over a comment that news anchor George Stephanopoulos made. As NPR’s David Folkenflik reported, Stephanopoulos pressed Rep. Nancy Mace over why “she would support him given that she had, as she had poignantly attested, been the victim of rape early in life and that Trump himself had been found liable for rape in a civil case.” Legal experts said ABC could have easily won in court.
CBS spiked a “60 Minutes” report about the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador where the U.S. was sending migrants with no due process. After much outcry, the segment was aired at a later date.
ABC canceled Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel when FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to pull the licenses of their broadcast affiliates. A massive backlash and boycott against ABC owner Disney forced the company to put Kimmel back on the air.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos pulled the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, fearing retaliation by a future Trump administration over contracts that Bezos’ other businesses like Blue Origin had with the federal government.
My greatest disgust is reserved for Bezos. The Post was the inspiration for journalists of my generation. What’s happening there is a prime example of the shortfalls of having important media outlets owned by billionaires and corporate conglomerates because of the conflict of interest between the public good and what’s good for their financial interests.
Let’s zoom in on a recent case.
By now, it shouldn’t surprise me when I glance at the editorial headlines in the Post — yes, I still subscribe — and see another opinion piece that trashes the reputation of a once-great newspaper. I marvel at how the journalists on the editorial board can remain in a job where they have essentially been reduced to being stenographers for a greedy, cowardly billionaire who understands nothing about the responsibility that comes with being a pillar of the Fourth Estate, the unofficial branch of government that holds the others accountable.
Last week’s eye-roller appeared under the headline “Janet Mills makes the right call on data centers.” The governor of Maine vetoed a bill to place a moratorium on the construction of new data centers, the massive complexes that are draining electricity and water resources across the country to power the artificial intelligence needed for generating those amusing videos of dancing cats we see on Facebook.
The Post applauded Mills’ decision to go full-speed ahead on infrastructure that, until recently, was not considered essential. Why do you suppose the Post would focus its editorial attention on liberating data centers in Maine? Ever hear of Amazon Web Services? AWS is an IT company that provides Cloud hosting services to companies that don’t want to buy and maintain tons of servers. Their clients include Netflix, Airbnb, NASA and Capitol One. AWS has the biggest share of the Cloud market at 30 percent and is the biggest money-maker in Bezos’ corporate empire.
The number of servers AWS uses is estimated to be in the millions, and these servers reside in — you guessed it — data centers, some 900 of them at last count. Putting the brakes on the construction of new data centers would threaten the growth of Bezos’ most profitable enterprise, hence the Post’s editorial. Hence another nail in the coffin of the Post’s legacy.
So here we are, living in a time when a free and independent press is needed more than ever to push back on the authoritarian tendencies of the current administration. Instead, we have news outlets whose corporate owners are beholden to — fearful of, I would say — a wanna-be dictator who constantly belittles the reporters who cover him. The correspondents’ dinner on Saturday was shaping up to be a humiliating night for America’s press, a humiliation delayed by the bizarre actions of a gunman from California.
The current model of media ownership has turned the vaunted Fourth Estate into a toothless tiger that strikes no fear in the hearts of tyrants. For a better model, I would turn to non-profit NPR. Despite having federal funding pulled by a spiteful regime, NPR soldiers on because of support from an appreciative public.
Imagine that. The power of the press residing with the people.
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