The event is perfectly emblematic of the rot at the heart of contemporary journalism, including both its practitioners and its corporate owners and executives. Here we have the people who are purportedly charged with telling us all the truth about people in power, dressing up in finery, eating $100 a plate dinners and drinking expensive champagne, hobnobbing and sharing yucks with those very same powerful people. The purpose is to confirm that they're all part of the same club, the same elite level of society, sharing common interests and a common relationship with the rabble who can only look on in envy.
I'll quote Paul Campos on this. He isn't always right, but when he is he says it well:
It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how utterly disgusting it is that purported journalists showed up for last night’s circus in the first place. Quite irrespective of whether the assassination attempt was real or not, this whole event was the kind of media event that has made Trump who he is, which is a president of the United States who is trying very hard to destroy liberal democracy. Showing up for this kind of thing at all makes you a collaborator in that project. And claiming that it’s your job — that you were just following orders as it were — doesn’t make it any better.
After the remaining guests—who'd assembled in their finery to fête and network with the authoritarians strip-mining American society, rolling back rights and civil liberties, and rounding up demonized minorities into literal concentration camps, and who will return unscathed to their stations of power over the rest of us tomorrow—milled around for a while, taking selfies and helping themselves to the abandoned bottles of expensive champagne left on tables, security personnel informed them that the evening's festivities would not resume and instructed them to leave. A little while later Trump spoke to the press, including CBS News White House correspondent and WHCA member Weijia Jiang, who'd been seated beside him at the dais during the dinner. The recipient of a $400 million luxury airliner gifted him by the royal family of Qatar, presently engaged in a scheme to sue his own Treasury Department into paying him $10 billion, boasted that, to the extent the fracas at the security checkpoint may have represented an attempt on his life, it attested to his historical importance.
"I hate to say I'm honored by that," he said, "but I've done a lot."
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