I do have some empathy for Eugene Daniels, as on a somewhat smaller scale I’ve been in his shoes. Daniels is the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, a side hustle with an industry trade organization that compliments his current role with MSNBC and his legacy with POLITICO. Without question, their most public-facing moment every year is their annual dinner, which tonight will take place in Washington. And one of the more signature responsibilities of someone in that position is to shepherd the meticulous planning of thatevent which THE HILL’s Judy Kurtz reminded her readers yesterday is thusly defined:
The event, described by the WHCA as its “main source of revenue,” including for scholarships and “events and programs to educate the public about the value of the First Amendment and a free press”. A crop of Hollywood heavyweights typically fly into the nation’s capital for the weekend-long festivities, reveling alongside journalists, lawmakers and political figures. In recent years, VIP guests including Scarlett Johansson, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson, Kim Kardashian, John Legend and Brooke Shields have been among the crowds packed inside the Washington Hilton hotel’s ballroom to hear remarks from the sitting president.
So making sure you’re serving the essential purpose of what the event is designed to honor–the accomplishments of its constituents–while providing an incentive for them to shell out the cost of attending is a thankless responsibility that under normal circumstances involves walking a very fine line. I’ve been to more than enough dinners in hotel ballrooms to know that the food is typically mediocre and I strongly suspect those that have expense accounts in Washington know way better watering holes–indeed, I suspect many of those attendees are supplementing their experience with meals at such Michelin-friendly establishments.
When I served as the chairman for the research division of cable TV’s marketing arm when such things mattered, my team was tasked with a similar challenge to the one that landed on Daniels’ doorstep. We learned from our full-time staffers–Washington-based, no less–that having a headliner comedian as an inducement was a readily available solution, and a generous budget had been set aside for it. There was some healthy debate on whether this was money being well spent at all, given that we were already seeing some collaborative studies many of us were looking forward to conducting–which our full-time employers were beginning to avoid doing on their own dime–were being cut back upon. At the end of the day, the keynote speaker idea prevailed. We were given a list of available names in our price range, and after still more healthy debate our heavily New York-centric and Baby Boomer team (yes, myself included) landed on Gabriel Kaplan.
A lot of us grew up as fans of his from his signature role as the title character in the Brooklyn-based 70s sitcom WELCOME BACK, KOTTER, which eventually became known as the show that discovered John Travolta. Much like Ron Howard was usurped on HAPPY DAYS by the overwhelming popularity of what started out as a supporting player, Henry Winkler’s “The Fonz”, Travolta’s Vinnie Barbarino defined cultural zeitgeist of the era and eventually took him away from the show to pursue his starring roles in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and GREASE. But if you were from our era, you still had warm memories of Kaplan’s role as the beleaguered young teacher of a crop of underachieving students known as “The Sweathogs” who were essentially propsfor a show that evolved out of his stand-up routines and his spot-on impersonation of Groucho Marx.
But the younger end of our membership–the ones that actually came to these events to learn and grow–had little idea who Kaplan was, as even the reruns of KOTTER by this point were sparsely shown. Kaplan’s claim to fame, and his justification for booking, was that he was fronting a poker series that had successfully transitioned to several different cable networks when such programming was becoming more prominent. We were told research played a prominent role in those maneuvers.
What we got was a bloated, middle-aged version of Kaplan with a head cold and jet lag whom we flew cross-country for the event. Who as it turned out had delegated most of the negotiations for his shows to colleagues he had little direct touch with, so when our attendees took advantage of the Q and A he pled ignorance to most of the well thought-out questions. We politely called this a “learning experience”, but let’s just say it was not one of the higher-scoring elements of our convention’s ostensible signature event.
I dredge all this up because Daniels had initially invited LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS writer Amber Ruffin to be this year’s WHCA dinner headliner. But as he explained in an interview with DEADLINE’s Ted Johnson that dropped earlier this week, those plans changed:
DANIELS: Those conversations, that thought process started happening around the time that the White House started blocking the AP. And the reason was because the mood of the press corps, and the feelings that that we felt on the board and that we heard from some of our members. And that just became very obvious as time went on, that at the end of the day, the focus needs to be on the journalists and journalism, and uplifting the folks in that room at a time when not everyone’s feeling uplifted because of the attacks on the press.
DEADLINE: The White House was also out there attacking the comedian as well. Was that a factor?
DANIELS: No. That wasn’t a factor. The White House’s objections to the comedian had nothing to do with our decision. We stand up to the White House all the time.
I’ll take those remarks at face value out of respect for his position. I’ll hope he ultimately did what we should have team–read the room.
The choice of Ruffin, a regular contributor to a show that devotes a couple of extended segments per four-day week to skewering the missteps of the current administration, was inflammatory both because of her materia but, sadly, also because of her demography. A Black female, and one who recently ended her marriage and announced she had come out.
This is absolutely not an attack on how Ruffin chooses to live her professional and personal life. But it is one on an organization whose function is to cover the administration currently in power as objective journalists, at least as much as this crop of cronies will allow. Providing a pulpit for Ruffin, who has never backed down from injecting her slant and bias into her work, at such a sensitive time would have been exceptionally counterproductive.
And someone who all to well knows the impact of that pulpit recently gave her take on it to VARIETY’s Daniel D’Addario:
Michelle Wolf has some tough words for the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The comedian – whose 2018 set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the journalistic group famously disavowed – is friends and former “Late Night With Seth Meyers” writers’ room colleagues with Amber Ruffin.
(Per Wolf); I love Amber. I used to work with her on “Seth,” and we’re friends to this day. I thought that was a very interesting choice for the Correspondents’ Association in the first place, because obviously, they knew Trump was president. And I’m not at all surprised that they dropped her, because they want to keep their access. They don’t want to make Trump mad. I think Amber would have said some really funny and true things. But – this has been my experience with the Correspondents’ Association – they maybe were also worried about the truth that might be told about them, and the failures of current journalism, which are huge and awful for society. It feels like everything’s entertainment now; nothing’s just some guy explaining what happened. It’s CNN being like, “You have to watch us – we’re bleeding ad money.”
So Daniels has pivoted–some call it knee-bending–and providing, in the spirit of the moment, alternative narrative to the likes of Johnson:
Everyone can expect a dinner that tries to match the moment that we’re living in, that works to match the mood of the press corps, and that is working to fit the need of celebrating the First Amendment, celebrating the award winners, celebrating the scholarship students that are there, and at its core, celebrating the people that go to the White House every single day, holding the most powerful leaders in our country accountable. It’s going to look a little different for folks. … Will there be moments of levity? Maybe. Probably not. Even the videos that we have are more earnest and in a defense of journalism and a celebration of the work that the WHCA does everyday.
I’d like to think there is more than a little merit to that approach. It’s certainly the sort of feedback my team eventually got. Celebrate the accomplishments of those who benefit most, not devote time and resources to a paid speaker. The president had no intention of showing up in any event, but now with the convenient excuse of beginning the day a continent away attending Pope Francis’ funeral the mood would have likely not allowed for any material–certainly not from someone with Ruffin’s ‘tude–to have gone forward without controversy. Sometimes these things do have a way of working out.
I’ll hope the 2600 or so in attendance will be able to enjoy themselves and enjoy the moment where they celebrate what they consider freedom and contemplate where they may ultimately wind up for a nightcap and perhaps a better quality cut of meat. Maybe by next year the temperature might be dialed down enough to revisit a comedian headliner again. Reading the room to determine who might play broadly enough would be highly advised.
I hear these days you can get Gabe Kaplan at an even better price than I did.
Until next time…