The dinner of the correspondents of the White House cancels the appearance of the anti-Trump actor | Trump administration

The comedy is out of the menu of the annual dinner of the correspondents of the White House, a meeting formerly friendly for journalists to meet officials of the federal governments who have become too busy for lightness in the middle of the second presidency of Donald Trump.

Dinner, scheduled for April 26, is Organized by the Association of White House correspondents (WHCA), and it generally presents a post-repas comic interlude where an actor begins to work on the powerful. Starting with Calvin Coolidge in 1924, each president attended at least one Whca dinner – except Trump.

But this year, the WHCA, already at war with the White House, on certain restricted accessories of News Nights to Air Force One and at the Oval Office, selected Amber Ruffin, an actor from Nebraska known to have mixed his humor with singing and dance routines – and for having frequently criticized the Trump administration.

The deputy chief of staff of the White House, Taylor Budowich, attacked the association for having planned to lead the Ruffin Light, opening a new front in a conflict between the president and the press which started when the administration said – and not the press association – would now organize the rotary basin of media members covering the president.

On Saturday, the WHCA announced that it abandoned Ruffin’s comic performance, so that “the emphasis is not” put on the policy of the division “, but rather on the honor of the work of the group’s journalist, according to the president of the Eugene Daniels association.

The decision essentially left the WHCA without a friend. Budowich criticized Ruffin’s performance ball, calling it “cop” and calling the artist “full of hatred”. He said that it was “so sad that a group as light and consequent was so quickly led in non-all of”.

But others considered the WHCA’s decision as an additional proof that the press, as a whole, has become too ready to look at the wishes of the administration, in particular after a series of colonies of media societies in cases of apparently winning defamation as well as continuous efforts of the White House to undo the media supported by the government, in particular the voice of America.

Ruffin, an actress nominated for Emmy and Tony, began her career as a writer for the end of NBC with Seth Meyers, an American talkshow with a stronger political fold than most. She recently joked on a dispute between the White House and the Associated Press on the executive order of Trump to rename the Gulf of Mexico as a Gulf of America – a conflict that started the AP of the presidential plane and the oval office.

“I was like” what! ” Now, do you care about death? “Said Ruffin, laughing, a reference to hostility that many conservatives are targeting transgender people.

Trump has a story in conflict with association dinner. In 2011, the president of the time, Barack Obama, turned his comic spotlight on Trump, who was in the public, on Trump’s concern against Obama’s birth certificate. Obama called the potential president “the Donald” and said that he should regain questions that matter, “as we simulated the landing of the moon?”

Trump won his first presidency five years later.

Dinner itself has long been examined, with some wondering if a sumptuous and a jovial meeting between the press and the government, which are very co-dependent but which have opposite interests, should occur in the first place.

The hill decided to withdraw from the dinner after the fact that Michelle Wolf delivered a routine according to which the president of the catch, James Finkelstein, found “offensive” and “vulgar”.

“There is simply no reason for us to participate in something that throws our profession in bad light,” he said.

False kinship, high hostility, traffic in jobs between the media and the government, and other aspects of the relationship raise ethical questions for both.

For example, some have seen the recent scandal surrounding the editor -in -chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, is added to a group cat on the signal in which the members of the Trump cabinet discussed the plans of a military strike as a journalistic coup. But others wondered if a journalist was inadvertently added to such a group – as was the case in Signalgate – could illustrate how relations between the press and the members of the government can obtain.

Other questions that have pushed the dinner of the correspondents in the course of examination include the restrictions of the Trump administration on the access of the consumer media to the press cabins of the Ministry of Defense as well as the habit of the President to ask where journalists work – and to ignore those whose employers deploy it.

The Washington Post recently wondered if conflicts contributed to a loss of appetite for the high -level event. A veteran of the White House press told the point of sale that there was an increasing feeling that it should be rebuilt.

“It was a bad idea for a long time. It was even more a bad idea at this point,” said the Chief of the White House of the New York, Peter Baker in The Outlet. Times has long chosen dinner.

An unnamed journalist of the White House also told the post that dinner had never been superb, but now, above all, are we really going to get involved in our tuxedo and our ball dresses with members of an administration that reduced access to the press. “

Ron Fournier, a former head of the Washington office for the Associated Press, said journalists would be better to call sources and file requests for freedom of information. He said: “Why being with powerful people if the only way they use their power is to lie to the public and lower your profession and undermine the amendment in the Constitution that your profession is built?”