Here are the articles of surrender, in case you wonder one day how it all happened.

"Dear Members:

"I want to tell you how much your kind words meant to me following my personal remarks at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner about the roots of my belief in journalism’s essential role.

"I also have heard from members expressing dismay with the entertainer’s monologue and concerns about how it reflects on our mission. Olivier Knox, who will take over this summer as our president, and I, recognize these concerns and are committed to hearing from members on your views on the format of the dinner going forward. Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.

"Every day we are working hard to advocate for our members and ensure coverage that benefits the public, and the dinner is an important opportunity to highlight and maintain our essential work. The White House Correspondents’ Association remains dedicated to that mission.

"Margaret Talev"

Faced with an administration* and a president* dedicated to poisoning both the spirit and the institutions of free government, and faced with an administration* and a president* dedicated only to looting those institutions that it cannot destroy, the representatives of the elite political media, through the woman at the head of their formal association, Margaret Talev, have determined that bowing to the fauxtrage aimed at a comedian on behalf of the administration*’s paid liar is the proper way to respond to the weekend’s festivities. The commitment to a free press is not common to this nation’s people any more, if it ever was, and it damn sure doesn’t have any fans in this administration*. Anyone who thinks that “a vigorous and free press” and “honoring civility” are equally desirable goals doesn’t love the former enough to deserve the latter.

Think of how things have slid from the days when William Lloyd Garrison published his first issue of The Liberator in Boston in which Garrison wrote what I consider the essential statement of purpose for any country with a First Amendment.

I AM aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as Truth, and as uncompromising as Justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.

Horribly uncivil, that. But vigorous, for sure, and proudly free.

Mocking the White House Correspondents Association Dinner now has become as banal and obvious as the event itself is, which is a tough bar to clear. But there is something in that statement that turns the screws a little harder. Even in the best of times, which these are not, the White House beat is a death march. In bad times—now, say, or during the Watergate period—the job is almost unspeakably dreary.

Michelle Wolf during her performance at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner. Getty Images

In his essential account of the 1972 election, The Boys on the Bus, author Tim Crouse dedicated an entire chapter on the misery of the White House press corps during the fourth Year Of Nixon. Crouse quoted the late Russell Baker, who called covering the White House “a strange, airless kind of work,” and longed for his days covering the House where, Baker told Crouse,“There were 435 people who all loved to talk.”

Today, the White House beat may not be airless, but it’s never been stranger. And, it seems, that the whole idea of wrapping your lives around whatever lies Sarah Huckabee Sanders plans to spout that day can be so dispiriting that you have to pump yourself up just to get through the day. From Politico:

Other top White House reporters I spoke to felt the same way—bone-tired, but still infused with the sense that they’re on a historic mission covering a norm-busting presidency. “I think we all want to say in 50 years we covered Donald Trump’s White House,” says the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey.

You will never hear reporters covering other catastrophes say anything like this. You won’t hear someone looking over a fresh plane crash and talk about how he’s going to have a great memory to talk about five decades later. And, to be fair, there has been as much great reporting on the catastrophe from inside the gates along Pennsylvania Avenue as there has been outside them, but it’s still a job that you do inside iron gates behind hundreds of men with guns, and the place hasn’t looked or felt this much like a fortress since the summer of 1974.

The daily briefings are pointless. Sanders isn’t even a particularly accomplished liar. (Neither is her boss.) The benign faces she puts on malignant policies are thin and transparent. The idea that people actually are carrying her water in reply to Michelle Wolf’s monologue on Saturday night is absolutely astonishing to me. (I thought the routine was a solid B, and I’ve never seen a standup for whom every joke landed, except for the late Richard Pryor.)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not your friend. She is, professionally, the enemy.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not your friend. She is, professionally, the enemy. I don’t care if most of the time she’s a combination of Florence Nightingale, Mother Superior, and Cher. When she gets behind the podium, her job is to belittle you and your profession and, by proxy, all of us who practice it. She is a tower of contempt. That she was discomfited on Saturday night because of a comedian is part of what she gets paid for. Discomfiting the likes of Sarah Huckabee Sanders is part of what Michelle Wolf got paid for. The forces were perfectly in balance.

But that statement...Lord, what a mess that is. It devalues what it proposes to defend and it trivializes what it claims is of paramount importance. In an age that demands what Whitman called a barbaric YAWP from all corners of the journalistic community, it is the squeaking of a hamster wheel. Next year, they should have that dinner in Stockholm.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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