This is the full text of Margaret Talev's statement after the blowback to Michelle Wolf's monologue at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.
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
This statement needs to be unpacked.
My comments on this statement begin with two main points:
One, this statement was entirely performative.
Two, this statement was densely packed lies.
I'm far from the first to point out how the statement is performative. It's nothing more than show to make WHCA appear Very Dignified And Above Michelle Wolf's Remarks. (Or rather "the entertainer's" -- more on that later). The target audience for Talev's performance is the administration that Wolf dragged during her monologue, in her effort to reassure them that Wolf's remarks do not represent the WHCA.
And one of the indicators that the statement was densely packed lies was in this act of performative indignation, and those lies began with Talev's very first sentence. You know, where she speaks of her belief in journalism's essential role.
Journalism does have an essential role in a functioning republic. Its role is to act as an independent source of information, an engine to pursue the truth wherever it leads, and a primary means to check how and whether the elected leaders are serving the people, or instead serving themselves.
But all Talev's protestations about how important the "mission" of the WHCA is and the "journalism" it putatively represents (even using the word "mission" three times and emphasizing what that “mission” is half a dozen more) ring very hollow and sound more like overcompensation than conviction. And they sound that way because the WHCA is not about "a vigorous and free press"; it is about access. Access to the White House, access to its staff, access to the Press Secretary, access to its spokespeople who will provide soundbites and statements that allow those White House Correspondents and the media companies for which they work to fill their increasingly valueless news and commentary programs with content and get eyeballs on their screens.
Which is why they had to distance themselves from Michelle Wolf. Had they stood by her monologue or even remained silent, they would have upset the people within the halls of power to whom these correspondents' livelihood depends on access. And she yanked those powerful people's chains through doing something increasingly foreign to White House correspondents: Speaking the truth.
Wolf was, without a doubt, ascerbic, crass, and insulting, most significantly toward Trump and his administration. But she was also truthful, and punched exclusively up. She pulled no punches and sugar-coated nothing in the name of "dignified" comedy. In fact, there isn't a single lie or false statement behind the jokes in her entire set. (Contrast that with Trump's "jokes" at the traditional Al Smith charity dinner in 2016, where he was no less nasty in tone but also based jokes on several lies about Clinton, including the fiction that she had been kicked off the Watergate Commission.)
She said things that White House Correspondents dance around. She said things that commentary shows' talking heads will only entertain hearing if there's someone to lie, I mean to "provide balance", in response, and sometimes not even then.
She said the Trump family was corrupt - they are. She said Trump is racist - he is. She said said Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders are serial liars - they are. She said Megyn Kelly was useless as a journalist - she is. She said Sean Hannity isn't a journalist at all - he's not. She said FOX News was full of sexual predators - they were, and probably still are.
And most unforgivably, she said the assembled press in front of her helped create, because they profit off of, the daily outrages of the Trump presidency. This is the big uncomfortable truth, because it calls out the symbiotic relationship between the "vigorous and free press" and the administration, putting the lie to the WHCA's claims of being possessed of either vigor or freedom.
In the vernacular of the Internet, "Where is the lie?"
But I'm fairly confident that it was Wolf's remarks about the WHCA's interdependence with the Trump administration that bothered the WHCA leadership the most.
The "tell" that leads me to this conclusion is what I alluded to above -- that rather than mention Wolf by name, or give her a different designation, she was referred to only as "the entertainer."
Think about that. She was not referred to by any name or designation that says she was there to deliver a message of any real meaning; she was just "the entertainer." That's a subtle, yet obvious, way to rhetorically diminish the weight of Wolf's words, particularly those calling out the chummy access-based relationship between the WHCA and the Trump White House (and to the rest of the halls of Federal power, for that matter), at an event which really was about a celebration of that transactional access, in flat contradiction to what Talev claims is the WHCA's "mission".
There's another "tell" in here and it's in this part of Talev's statement:
"...a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting ..."
In a contentious age, civility is not a close cousin to a vigorous and free press and certainly isn't well acquainted with great reporting. The truth doesn't give a damn about civility. Civility is cloaking the truth in obfuscation. Civility is allowing someone to rebut the truth with lies while adopting a position of passive neutrality between the two. Civility is asking polite questions about manifestly corrupt behavior without calling it by name, and being satisfied when no answers are given.
Civility is one of the WHCA's arms in its arsenal of excuses for the depth of its dereliction of duty.
Oh, Michelle Wolf's remarks about Sarah Sanders certainly got the most attention, with "civil" journalists distorting the Aunt Lydia reference and the eye shadow joke into insults about Sanders' appearance rather than accusations about her betrayal of women and constant stream of lies. They circled their wagons around the person who feeds them White House fiction five days a week with practiced skill.
But what "the entertainer" said about the WHCA's incestuous relationship with the White House, and the profound damage that relationship has caused American democracy -- those lines are the ones that cut the deepest, and the mainstream media will not spend any time reflecting on them.
So the rest of us should.
And finally, let us never forget this post-script from the always on-point Ana Marie Cox: