Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House. Unlike 2025, the margins were comfortable. Obama knew he wouldn’t have to compromise a thing with the GOP for almost the next two years. “Elections have consequences” was the rhetoric equivalent of flipping the bird. 

Most of the media was fully on board with one-party Democratic rule. The 2008 campaign and its coverage of Obama and the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) were an exercise in drooling for the former, underscored by Bernard Goldberg’s 2008 bestseller, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.

Elections have consequences in 2025 as well. And we’re not just talking about Trump shutting down illegal crossings or diversity, equity, and inclusion and wokeness being shunned. We’re also seeing a major pivot: the embrace of nontraditional media outlets over legacy ones that have long dominated the front rows and access-rich press pools. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who, at 27, has exceeded expectations and then some as the youngest person ever to hold the position, is unapologetically leading the charge on this front. 

“For decades, a group of D.C.-based journalists, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore,” she recently announced.

And she’s right: The WHCA is much like the modern Democratic Party. Its leaders are installed without one vote from the public, as former Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) were. 

The current WHCA president, Eugene Daniels, claims to be unbiased while speaking truth to power without fear or favor to party. However, considering that Daniels just left his reporting job at Politico to host a partisan opinion show on MSNBC, it’s hard to take his claims of objectivity seriously. 

“The White House should abandon this wrong-headed effort and show the American people they’re not afraid to explain their policies and field questions from an independent media free from government control,” the WHCA said in response. 

“The White House picked this fight and continues to do so,” the WHCA continued. “Our members want to cover the administration without fear or favor, and stand ready to question government officials from any corner of the Brady Briefing Room.”

This is funny because most correspondents wanted no part in seriously questioning the last administration. This is especially true about former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, the biggest attempted cover-up in modern political history. The Hunter Biden laptop was called Russian disinformation. And COVID-19 could not possibly have come from a lab — the Chinese Communist Party said so. 

Even the so-called fact-checkers completely dropped the ball. For example, Biden’s White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now also an MSNBC host, was fact-checked just two times during her tenure by Politifact. Leavitt, just nine weeks in, has already exceeded that number. 

Some statements Psaki made were far from truthful yet were ignored by such gatekeepers. Some of the whoppers included: 

1) Republicans were actually the ones who supported defunding the police.

2) Biden had visited the U.S. southern border before (He drove by it in a motorcade once on the way to a campaign event in New Mexico in 2008).

3) At a ceremony for 13 U.S. service members who were killed in Kabul during Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden was photographed looking at his watch. But Psaki claimed in her book on the Biden presidency, Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World, that “the president looked at his watch only after the ceremony had ended. Moments later, he and the First Lady headed toward their car.”

This was absolutely not true. The Associated Press, in fact, had photos of Biden looking at his watch on at least two separate occasions. 

“As my son and the rest of our fallen heroes were being taken off the plane yesterday I watched you disrespect us all five different times by checking your watch,” wrote Shana Chappell, mother of Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui on Aug. 30, 2021, on Facebook. 

Psaki was forced to remove the claim from her book. 

There are other examples, but you get the idea. Democrats mostly get a pass while in power. Republicans get interrogated. 

Trust in the media has cratered, especially compared to 1976, when Gallup first started polling on the topic. At that time, 74% of independent voters trusted the Fourth Estate. Today, that number is just 27%, while the overall number is just 33%. 

So, when we hear the WHCA screaming about how unfairly they’re being treated, there is no groundswell of sympathy coming from the public. They’ve earned this moment of being demoted in the press room for alternative outlets that, in some cases, reach far more people, including younger voters or the kind of non-propensity voters who propelled Trump to victory after he appeared on popular podcasts such as the Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, and the Ben Shapiro Show. 

If legacy outlets have to rotate off the front row during press briefings to make way for outlets that are rarely called upon, great. More voices, different kinds of questions, and reporters who aren’t looking to make themselves the story can’t be a bad thing. 

Meanwhile, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner once again found a way to be highly controversial. And once again, the Daniels-led WHCA has only itself to blame. 

In this year’s case, the association decided it was a fantastic idea to hire Amber Ruffin as its Master of Ceremonies. Ruffin is currently a writer for the insufferable Seth Meyers, who arguably is the most anti-Trump “comic” in late-night TV (and that’s really saying something). 

On a Daily Beast podcast recently, Ruffin once again went on a Trump Derangement Syndrome tirade, accusing members of the administration of being “murderers” while not being human. On Late Night with Seth Meyers on Monday night, she went so far as to compare Team Trump to Nazis, which is as tired as it is pathetic. 

Is this supposed to be funny? 

A look at hosts over the past decade underscores just how skewed the selection of the WHCD emcee has become. Colin Jost, Trevor Noah, and Ron Chernow all share the same bias.

“As you all know, on Tuesday, the president let it be known that he wanted members of his administration to stay away from this dinner. And at first, I was puzzled by this news, but then I learned a rumor was circulating in Washington that I was going to be reading from the redacted sections of the Mueller report, and everything was explained,” Chernow joked as host in 2018.

That aged nicely, didn’t it?

Jay Leno holds the record for hosting the Correspondents’ Dinner the most times with five. He may be 75, but the guy understands how to do comedy in these situations. 

“You need to be equal and make sure that you give it to both sides and blah, blah, blah,” Ruffin says she was told by the WHCA. “I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be freaking doing that, dude, under no circumstances.'”

When the dinner kicks off later this month, there will be no comedian, and very few will watch. Trump and Leavitt are not attending. 

THE ANNUAL WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT’S DINNER FIASCO

Elections have consequences. That includes for the press, as seats get reshuffled in the Brady Briefing Room and at the annual Nerd Prom at the Washington Hilton, which will now feature one fewer Democratic activist with Ruffin out. 

Despite what you may read elsewhere, these are absolutely positive developments if the press want any of their integrity back.