The White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner is later this month and as has been the tradition since 1983, the post-dinner entertainment was to be provided by a comedian. This year, it was supposed to be Amber Ruffin, writer and star of The Amber Ruffin Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers. I say “supposed to” because on Saturday the WHCA cancelled Ruffin as the dinner’s entertainer, with WHCA president Eugene Daniels writing to association members that the evening’s “focus is not on the politics of division”. What is the focus, then? The politics of authoritarianism?
There are now headlines in Variety asking why the silence around Ruffin’s firing—and she was fired, as she was booked and was preparing for her appearance already—and I admit, I am part of the problem. Between being under the weather this week and a general dread of politics right now, I dragged my feet on this. But let me be clear now: I do not care who you voted for, I do not care if you like Amber Ruffin or even know who she is, we should ALL be concerned about a journalistic establishment that is afraid to challenge power, especially when power is already running amok. Full stop, THIS IS SCARY.
The press is supposed to be the “fourth estate”, they exist to inform the public and to hold power accountable, but we are living in a period of abject, craven abdication of journalistic responsibility. News networks are bending over backward to placate the Trump administration, which is as venal and retaliatory as any we’ve ever known in America. ABC settled a defamation suit many believed they could win, and still, Trump’s FCC is investigating parent company Disney for DEI policies (they’re investigating NBCUniversal, too, because “DEI” is the new “woke” and THAT is the real witch hunt). News outlets and their leadership are obviously afraid of Trump, and rather than band together and do their jobs, they’re giving in and trying to make nice, which isn’t going to work because you cannot “make nice” with someone determined to destroy you.
But back to Variety and their “why is no one talking about this” rhetoric, 1) people ARE talking about it. And 2) I don’t want to hear sh-t from Variety, or any other Penske Media-owned trade that has spent the last couple weeks blaming Rachel Zegler for the failure of Snow White and not first and foremost Disney insisting on remaking movies no one wants to see. Oh, NOW you care about The Culture being unfair to a woman of color? F-ck all the way off.
Besides, the people who scream about cancel culture and the people who do not care when Black people lose opportunities are the same people, the Venn diagram is a perfect circle. The “silence” around Amber Ruffin’s firing—which isn’t real because many major news outlets have covered this story—is in no small part due to the sheer number of people who don’t care that the WHCA silenced a Black woman.
I have long said that cancel culture isn’t real, that it is really just consequences for people saying or doing sh-tty things and other people not wanting to be around them because of it. And yes, you could say that Ruffin was cancelled because the WHCA did not want to be party to her potential comments about Trump and the press themselves. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Ruffin acknowledged she would have been “so terrifically mean”:
The WHCA wants to appease their White House daddy because the mainstream American media is a bunch of cowards when we need them most but make no mistake—they didn’t want to hear whatever Ruffin had to say about them, either. This is a moment of catastrophic failure on the part of our media, and undoubtedly, they knew Amber Ruffin would let them have it with both barrels over their mealy-mouthed both sides’ing of rising fascism in the US.
I am willing to wager that was the real problem, that the WHCA doesn’t want their fancy-shmancy party, which is of extremely questionable value in the best of times but most especially right now, in The Worst Times, being ruined by having to look in a mirror. They don’t want their White House daddy to be mad at them that they let a girl—a Black one, at that!—tell jokes on him, but they really, REALLY don’t want her to tell jokes on them, either. They don’t want to hear anything except smug laughter and the clinking of champagne glasses.
There are a lot of journalists working hard right now to bring real news and vital information to the American people in a time when there is so much news, and so much of it bad, that it is overwhelming to keep up. Local reporters, student journalists, or independent reporters—those are not the journalists I am talking about. I am specifically talking about the journalists of the WHCA, who would rather maintain cozy ties with a fascist than be the butt of a joke. The members of the WHCA should be embarrassed and ashamed of their craven leadership. The only silence around Amber Ruffin’s firing that matters is THEIR silence. Because that is the silence of the status quo, and the status quo is killing us.
Join us at The Squawk today to talk about Amber Ruffin's firing. (App link here)
