Washington’s Besieged Journalists Raise a Glass, Darkly

Usually, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner features Hollywood stars, a zinger-filled comedy set and a public display of comity between the White House and the press corps that covers it.

On Saturday, the dinner had no comedian and no president. Among the smattering of celebrities on hand was Michael Chiklis, whose best-known television role, in “The Shield,” concluded in 2008.

“It’s just us,” Eugene Daniels, the association’s president and an MSNBC host, told his fellow journalists at the start of the night.

The reporters who spoke from the dais emphasized the importance of the First Amendment, garnering repeated ovations from the black-tie crowd. Levity came in the form of clips from past years, when presidents still turned up and cracked wise about the press and themselves.

Hand-wringing about the dinner, once the apex of the capital’s social calendar, is as much a Washington tradition as the corporate-sponsored parties that surround it. But as media institutions grapple with an onslaught from President Trump — who has sued and threatened television networks, barred The Associated Press from presidential events and upended the day-to-day workings of the White House press corps — the notion of a booze-soaked celebration felt particularly jarring.

“The mood and reality sucks,” said Jim VandeHei, the journalist and news executive who helped create Politico and then Axios, two stalwarts of the Beltway media.