The White House Media Christmas Party Is Finally Dead

The access-humpers will have to find somewhere else to dine and schmooze this holiday season.

Following earlier reports that President Donald Trump might cancel the White House media dinner, Fox News confirmed that bombshell with an EXCLUSIVE story on Thursday. The annual dinner was long held in the East Wing of the White House, where reporters and media executives scarfed down snacks and drinks while waiting in line to sell their souls by having their picture taken with the president and First Lady.

Last year’s party started at 2 p.m. instead of the normal evening time, causing a small frenzy among the reporters hoping to bring a plus-one and convince said plus-one that they are Cool. It also came right in the middle of one of the many ongoing spats between Trump and CNN, which prompted the network to skip the party altogether. This gave way to a round of inane, masturbatory coverage of the ethics of attending the party at all, crescendoing with pieces like this from Politico, which featured the godawful admission that, “many reporters stressed that they wanted to attend in order to maintain a normal sense of decorum.” This was after Trump skipped the 2017 White House Correspondent’s Dinner in April, which he did again in 2018.

The cancellation of the holiday party is, on the whole, a good thing. Journalists and reporters, at least those hoping to cling to a shred of credibility, should not want to let loose or party or especially take pictures with their sources. Doing any of that, or pretending to do it ironically, is not funny or source work, it’s a dissolution of the barrier between the government and the press, one that leads to soft, whitewashed coverage and the kind of useless, self-serving, horse-trading journalism that plagues major national outlets.

Now, if we could only do away with the Correspondents’ dinner, we’ll really be cooking with grease.