This Saturday I attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was probably only minutes into the program when I began to struggle to make sense of the narrative being pushed. I had prepared myself for attacks on President Trump and my own beliefs. I had not prepared myself for a complete retelling of the history that I had lived through, that all Americans had lived through, which is exactly what I ended up witnessing.
When journalist Alex Thompson received the Aldo Beckman Award for Excellence in White House Coverage, specifically his coverage of Biden’s age and acuity, the room filled with applause. Thompson said that he, and others, plainly “missed” a lot of the story when it came to the cognitive decline of President Biden.
The problem here is that while he advocated for telling the truth, a room full of journalists applauded the sentiment, knowing very well that they themselves had lied. Saying that the media missed the story about Biden’s mental decline is much more than a long stretch of the truth. For years, countless people raised the issue of Biden’s mental fitness. Videos flooded the internet, and thousands were pointing out the fact that this was not the same man the world had seen during his political career of over 50 years.
This was not a story that was easily missed. In fact, this was a story that was absolutely impossible to miss for anybody that was in the room on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton hotel.
Thompson’s speech was about doing better. About not making that same mistake twice. A wonderful sentiment that would have meant a lot more to me and countless others, if we hadn’t already seen this “mistake” occur many times over the last decade.
Back when Donald Trump was just a candidate for president, we saw the attacks begin. We all witnessed Hillary Clinton being referred to as the most qualified person to ever seek the office of the president. The media was so convinced that their work to push the American people to vote for Clinton would be successful, they were jokingly referring to her as “Madame President” before the election even took place. And let’s not forget how quickly after the election she was suddenly being referred to as a “deeply flawed candidate,” a far cry from the most qualified person to ever seek the office.
What about the “mistake” we saw with the investigative journalism into Trump’s collusion with Russia that won a Pulitzer Prize? Or when Donald Trump and his supporters were smeared after the president referred to the “good and bad people on both sides” after he had actually very clearly already disavowed the bad actors involved?
The awards at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner are to be given for news coverage of the administration in order to show that even the most powerful institution in the world still has checks. However, the fact is much of the media spent the last four years covering up for that very institution instead of scrutinizing it. Even worse, they attacked others who attempted to question what was going on.
Saturday night was an attempt to rewrite the history that we all lived through and remember all too well. As George Orwell once warned, “those who control the present control the past.”
Thompson is not the first person to come out and say that he recognizes that mistakes were made, nor that journalists need to do better. After being a part of the historic win that was the 2016 Trump campaign, on November 9th, 2016, I believed the media when they said they wanted to do better. Eight years later I found myself not only listening as they made the same promise once more but watching as they also rewarded themselves for it.
I looked around in awe as folks nodded along to the idea that they frankly just overlooked the Biden White House’s attempt to cover up for his overwhelming decline. Suddenly I could remember every time I, or members of our campaign team were scolded for bringing up what the entire world had easily noticed.
The hypocrisy seemed to be lost on almost everyone in the room.
President Trump breaking with tradition and not attending the White House Correspondents Dinner is not the story that needs to be told. The media, breaking with tradition and losing the faith of the American people, simply because they needed to push their own agenda, is the story of the last decade in the United States of America.
I realized on Saturday night that everybody has stopped listening to our once trusted legacy media. Our media pushed everyone into their own echo chambers, as they themselves retreated back to the most ironic echo chamber of all, a room with hundreds of fellow journalists, once again patting themselves on the back for admitting their mistakes and promising that this time they will do better.