The Laughing Room

On a laugh, a barn dog, and who the press really works for

I’d watched the clip four times before I brought it up to Patricia. Kristen Welker in a nice dress and her head tilted back, laughing in some ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria at something Stephen Miller had just said to her. Not politely. Not the laugh you give when a stranger tells a joke at a table at someone’s wedding to be nice. The laugh that comes up in someone’s chest before any part of them that’s supposed to be on guard has a chance to tell it not to.She looked like she was having the time of her life.

I’ll be quick on the disclaimers because I don’t need them anymore, and I’m done with the pretending I do. It wasn’t Trump himself, not in that specific clip, but it was his deputy chief of staff. And every place I’ve ever worked, every yard I’ve ever known has had one animal like this.The one you don’t let sleep indoors. The one you keep it tied to a post out in the backyard with about six feet of chain. Feed it just enough so it doesn’t die. It’s not necessarily supposed to guard anything; it’s supposed to chase whatever gets too close to the fence line, so that the man who owns the property never has to do it himself. Everybody on the place knows what the dog is there for. Nobody says it out loud; otherwise, it would be admitting we have a dog. Doesn’t matter. Same big tent, same big, black-tie dinner (the one the scheduling moved from April to July because some guy supposedly with knives and guns decided to show up at the opening; it doesn’t always work), same class of people, same room, same arrangement that’s been going for so long that nobody is even embarrassed about it anymore.Listen I have watched that dog pacing back and forth my entire life and I have never heard anyone say exactly what it was or why it was there.

I used to give these guys the benefit of the doubt. I don’t anymore, and I want to say very simply why, because I suspect the doubt was always the thing that sustained this relationship. You spend your year trying to find the best questions to ask, asking the ones that are sharp enough, hard enough, sometimes so sharp or so hard that the guy actually leaves the interview in mid-sentence. This, incidentally, happened to Kristen that very same year, the year the clip was taken, because the guy didn’t like being told the results of the California primary. And then, a few months later, you dress up in the nice dress, get in the car and you walk into the ballroom and you are having a grand old time with his deputy chief of staff, because that was the invitation. And you don’t decline the invitation, because declining is how you become a person that won’t be invited back next year, and not being invited back next year means you become part of the rest of the population of people who, no matter who is president, you stop mattering to any of them. If you don’t matter,you stop making the machine money.

I am so tired of this bullshit.I have no desire now to treat this gently. It is not a lapse. It is not an emotional human moment you have to forgive people for, because everybody makes mistakes. This is, in all likelihood, the truest four seconds of film that we will have since 2016, and it’s showing a press corps that is perfectly content. It made peace with the fact of being kept, just so long as the price of being kept involves being allowed to sit near the head table and then having a pass on your table next year.

Let me try and be precise, because impreciseness is how these arguments get summarily dismissed as partisan whining. I am not talking about the reporter out there in rural Nebraska covering a meeting of the county commissioners when not even all the commissioners show up. I’m not talking about the young person at your local paper reporting on high school football scores for minimum wage; I’m not talking about the independent journalist sitting out in her car at six in the morning in the cold until her story gets confirmed, because that’s her job and only her job, and when she finally gets it confirmed, and she writes a sentence that cost her something.That costs her something, because she is no different than anyone else but for the fact that she wrote what is true because that’s what she does and so she wrote it for no other reason than that, and she will pay the price, while they in a ballroom will receive accolades because she said so. She’ll never get invited. She’ll not ever get mentioned. She will get no free dinner, no VIP, she will not get that because the invitation doesn’t go that far out. Such folks may never get the chance to appear at such a thing as this.

That’s who I am talking about. I’m talking about the real people. The ones who host the events at which these dinners take place and attend them when asked, and all the others,the ones that call themselves “the fourth estate”.The those who fly around the world with private airplanes to meet with leaders of their country at a conference on democracy while somehow maintaining that they “believe Trump poses a significant threat to American institutions”. Who are these people? These people with private airplanes flying in with all the world’s leaders, all their security, the round tables, all security everywhere. They have decided the compromise and its attending corruption are acceptable and preferable to the indignity of not getting a seat at that table, and they then perform outrage when people lose their belief in anything that we say. They aren’t surprised. They just picked their side.

The reporter in Curtis, Nebraska may make seven dollars an hour for all I know, she may drive four hours roundtrip to interview people to help verify a story only for all that to culminate in 100 words on page B5 for $8 a copy. You won’t find those people in those ballroom chairs. And these fellows have simply made their decision: that getting to be on the good team outweighs the idea of actually telling the truth. They decided all that is fair because they have been allowed on this big green grass stadium and have won their way to the bench.

Here’s where I snapped watching it last night. It wasn’t the shock. I wasn’t shocked.

It was just that I could no longer pretend that I was, or that I’d never seen it before, or that the whole predictable, circular, angry outrage that follows every single one of these clips is anything other than theater piled on theater piled on theater: a press class performing offense at being caught in its annual transgression; a public playing the same surprise right along with it because it’s easier than acknowledging we’ve seen the whole thing for quite a long time, we just didn’t want to discuss it openly at our own kitchen tables and then go to sleep feeling a righteous certainty that only willful ignorance can offer.

They are not our watchdogs. They have not been since the invitation became the whole story of the career itself. They are a class of professionals whose entire professional survival depends on keeping themselves extremely close to power so they can continue to be kept by it, and that proximity is draped in the language of democracy and the First Amendment because the First Amendment is also good for ratings. I say this not to insult, and I say it not out of spite.

I say it because I believe it is finally, precisely the truth.

And a country that is still looking to that room to save it will forever be met with exactly what that ballroom laugh promised: nothing, dressed exquisitely, and delivered with a straight face. God, it makes you feel sick after you let yourself be fooled into glancing off it, like we all have been for so long it’s practically a civic reflex.

My father taught me that you can tell who a man works for by who he’s careful around. Not who he likes. Who he’s careful around. Learn that, watch that over years past any individual administration and you will come away with a profound understanding of the actual lines of communication which a press release will rarely, if ever, give you.

I want to be extremely clear: this is not a story about Trump. I won’t allow this to be a Trump story because it is not that story; and I will no longer enable the particular brand of lies dressed as righteousness on either side. The revolving door doesn’t stop to check a party registration; it always spins the same greased direction regardless of who’s sitting in the Oval Office, and you can get proof simply by observing the individuals who spin it: George Stephanopoulos was director of communications for Bill Clinton and then spent a quarter of a century as a leading face at ABC News interviewing the very kinds of men he once spun for. Dana Perino stood at the presidential podium for George W. Bush and, ever since, has held a permanent seat at Fox News.

Jen Psaki went from President Biden’s communication director to MSNBC’s anchor desk and Kayleigh McEnany made the same leap from Trump’s podium to Fox’s couch.

Sean Spicer is now at Newsmax and Anthony Scaramucci’s eleven days of White House communications responsibility bought him a permanent gig as cable-news contributor. And then there’s Nicolle Wallace, who was communications director for George W. Bush: she went, not to Fox News (as perhaps expected given the affiliation), but to MSNBC, which is quite literally on the opposite end of the media spectrum from her former boss’s workplace-a point of information that tells you the door itself has never had anything at all to do with party politics or which cable-channel brand you align with; it was built for something else-for the continued employment of a particular kind of person and the comfortable perpetuation of his proximity to power, regardless of who is signed on for the decade to pay for it.

And if you doubt me, go look at the cluster of faces now performing as the moderators of every single “exclusive” presidential interview, as the figures sitting in attendance with perfect posture, as the ones shaking hands in the grand ballroom next to every president since either the last century or at least the beginning of the last one-you’ll see the same faces that attended the state dinners given by parties that are still calling one another dangers; you’ll see them at the gala, laughing at the same jokes, and you’ll realize, as you do, that the chair at the table hasn’t ever been the party’s; it’s been the industry’s; and it has never been for you to tell the difference, and certainly has never been for the woman outside the courthouse still waiting on confirmation.

I used to think this was almost entirely the province of financial compensation and would stop there, as if the greed was some kind of immutable fact of physics and thus forgivable. Now I don’t even accept that as an excuse.

Ratings demand access, access demands good relations with the people who can offer and deny it, and a network that loses the White House loses that access, loses that exclusivity, loses the booking, loses the booking, loses the advertising dollars, and the money; true.

Not a defense. Most industries manage to run on money and lie to the public to its face that that isn’t what they’re doing while they’re busy taking the check. Most industries do not consider the lie part of the product, “fearless,” “holding power accountable,” “the last line of defense,” all words, now etched on a coffee mug, the kind that can be bought in the gift shop located in the same building where the laughing was happening, while out there somewhere a kid with no gift shop and no coffee mug, who might actually, just might possibly want to do it for real and as a vocation, is being told that’s always been tradition.

I mean I need you to tell me why it is I cannot take the sentence, “Press scholarships were funded by the resources of an event honoring a man whom the press had spent the past year unequivocally declaring to be a monster, an event attended by the editors and journalists of such institutions, in tuxedo and gown....”

And culminating in an evening of banter and jokes, held at the exact same time there was an identical event across the country where a rookie reporter-without a tuxedo, and obviously without the gift shop access-was producing his report with genuine, unironic commitment and sincerity.

I understand that someone may wish to belong. I do. But there is one enormous, vital difference between the man who wishes for belonging, and remains silent regarding this desire because it’s a source of embarrassment for him; and then the man who wishes for belonging, is granted entrance for belonging, and then proceeds to loudly proclaim nightly on his televised program that he serves nobody and no cause, but truth, above that of his own integrity.

The second man is not suffering awkwardness.

The second man is pulling a con, whether or not he’s convinced himself the narrative he’s been selling to you and me.

It is unimportant to me now, whatever individual members of that press corps tell themselves on a daily basis, because the lie, in that case, is more efficient the more he believes it; the man who has fully convinced himself he is innocent isn’t even practicing a skill anymore. He doesn’t have to try to be convincing, because the truth doesn’t need him to believe it.

I think I can imagine that half of all the people watching this video would find that the last thing I’ve written does not even describe them at all, and I believe the last point persuades me further that I am right, and this part of my own critique is what has the slightest tendency to waver. It isn’t even because the well-greased machine does not need actual monsters to operate, but only needs operators who are comfortable working within it, and who would rather not risk scrutinizing the operation, when one is having such an incredibly delightful and engaging time examining other elements of the picture, such as the favorable approval ratings provided by that very same machine, the booking rates achieved by that same press corp, the contract terms of a future appearance to follow, so as to justify declaring the sum total of these comforts as objective, and calling anyone forthright about the true dynamics of that system “cynical.”

And so, no. I don’t think we can say it’s complicated.

I think if a friend had said that to me about that incident in the course of last year it would either lead me to believe, “Wow, he really needs to attempt to appear more distressed,” or perhaps worse, “I have to believe this person is more distressed than he is letting on,” before I sought out additional explanations. But I cannot imagine a thing less complicated than it is. I believe it is profoundly and utterly ugly, and I think its ugliness is ultimately sort of the point of the whole transaction.

And as a result, they’ve lectured us on media literacy because we believe that they shouldn’t be trusted.

They’re telling you who their friends and who their enemies are. That’s all they are.

They are not ours. I’m not even certain they actually ever were, not the most prominent among them anyway, but there can be no doubt that they are not now. Ours are the woman standing outside the courthouse, the man balancing a reporter position with a full-time job at minimum wage, and anyone working in that courthouse who would likely never have been invited to such a dinner party in the first place-much less had agreed to attend were they so asked.

But that’s not why I’m asserting that this isn’t just some whining of an old man 1000 miles away, and it’s not why I think this video you’re watching matters more than a four-second clip. It’s because that room, what occurs within that banquet hall among the “journalists present,” is how they tell you you can’t trust anyone but them when you question whether they should be trusted: They’ll accuse you of being radicalized, misinformed, of living on a solely fictitious personal grievance, rather than on a sense of moral outrage triggered by a four-hour party wherein every one present is continually reassured, laughter after uncontrollable fit of laughter, that they’re doing an important service by merely attending another one of these things, until mistrust wasn’t a theory about their profession anymore. It was just paying attention.

And do you think the woman standing at the checkout line, putting back a third of what’s in her basket because it doesn’t fit what’s in her account this week, doesn’t already know all this? Do you believe a man mucking out stalls for $12 an hour is dying for an invitation to that room? Do you believe me that at least one institution who will be in attendance at the party will not?

And I’ve gotten to the heart of the matter, which is that I don’t think this is any longer an accident, or a mistake, or even reason for embarrassment alone. It is why you were in this business; the objective cause. The objective cause of your endeavor has now morphed into a cause of dishonest behavior. And by that I do not mean in a malicious way that is common to the public, as in one’s “bad actor”-I mean that it now is an objective enemy, an object that is telling you in effect that it is providing everything that you want out of it as you give it, when, on the contrary, everything within its operation is compelling it to produce the opposite: the object is not on your side.

As water, once providing necessary life to the field in which I work, begins instead to pollute my entire project, do you believe there would be any other question, as my father would put it, than “is this my enemy?” This water is my enemy. It is the enemy of the crops.

And yet, we’re still offered the lie that everything will be fine. That is not true.

A confession... four seconds’ worth... inadvertent-but honestly truer than any subsequent statement on freedom of the press later produced at the awards gala.

A Folgers can in my father’s garage: He kept about 20 pounds of roofing nails and, beneath them, the equivalent of his month’s mortgage.

No one looked to place them in there-none would ever seek these items out as part of him. No. I know nothing anymore by any other standard apart from where people hide their nails, both men and institutions.

And while nobody would admit this in a group of “professionals” it’s now something in which everyone in that room knows the truth.

None of these will admit I am correct, but believe me. The woman working the night cashier’s job, calculating each day how to stretch their food budget will NEVER sit down at this table with the other members of her profession-as you already know-because this was a celebration.What she’s “for” will never matter here-it never did and it never will again-not the thing of why the dog is left in the barn on its own to starve.

I won’t do this...to conclude; it’s part of what many writers are told and the way many who have no alternative for career are conditioned-you can’t have access (the VIP perks), and still keep respect. In order to choose one implies giving up the other, and so here they picked access.

Now that was a bad decision.

Not the sort I may choose for myself-I choose the words that carry it with my own name behind it as a pledge that, even to this point, it’s the one true thing left-I know you’re going to sound like any sort of self-impressed “old man who’ll do you in” thinking that truth still matters-but that doesn’t make it any less valid that something that can’t be outright bought, or sold-even while those who were once compensated to chase it have stopped the chasing almost all together. We ain’t those people in that ballroom. Our collective selves aren’t built to be those people.

But I’m not going to end it there, because ending it there is its own kind of lie, the kind I’ve spent this whole essay fighting. Out there, somewhere in this town, is a reporter who didn’t get the invitation and wouldn’t have worn the dress had she done so. Sitting at a desk outside the courthouse, or at a kitchen table with a laptop and an alarm set for 5 a.m. to get up for her second job, and writing the sentence that won’t earn her any money and will do nothing to help her find her way back to that ballroom, but writing it anyway because it’s the truth and somebody needs to say it.

That’s not nothing, what she is doing. That is not a cut-down version of the real gig, not the consolation prize for the woman who wasn’t cool enough for the country club. That’s the real deal; the only version that was ever worthy of being labeled at all.

A town that does not have some woman willing to do what she is doing is not a peaceful town; it is a town that has been strip-mined in quiet - because there is nobody else there to see.

A commission meeting that no one is attending is where a contract is steered to an uncle by marriage. A doctor’s office closes for the day, on a Tuesday, and nobody would ever know the reason - unless the reason was that it was not somebody’s particular job to ask for an explanation. Never mind the entree. Never mind the acceptance speech.

The network that does not have to check in with the gentlemen in the suites to confirm that it still has not been invited does not need a ball room.

It needs to pull up an empty chair on a cold Tuesday morning and sit there in the dark to watch.

You don’t get to sell the access and hold onto the moral standing. They were interested in the access. She was interested in the truth. I know which one I trust to use my name, and it’s not the one that got the laugh.

The truth still matters. I know how that sounds-an old man in Nebraska, telling you that the truth matters like some other sloganeered nonsense from a coffee mug alongside the others. I don’t care how it sounds. It’s the only thing in this sordid mess that hasn’t already been sold out and can’t be bought outright-even if the people paid to pursue it seem to have gotten out of the habit of chasing it.

The room isn’t ours to command. It was never built that way. The sooner people in Scottsbluff, and every town like it, quit waiting to be saved by that room, and start listening to their own eyes, their own kitchen tables, their own nine miles of dead crops that no camera truck will ever bother to photograph, and start listening to the people still writing and researching for free because it’s the truth, the sooner they’ll stop being shocked, dinner after dinner, year after year, that four seconds of laughter proved a more accurate assessment of a decade’s worth of coverage than anything spoken straight up ever did.

If you stayed with me this long, thank you, plainly, no window dressing on that one. Most of what I write here is free and most of it always will be; that’s not up for negotiation. But stringing together three thousand words, putting them in a way that is worth your time, takes longer to do from the outside than it appears, and Patricia’s patience with me out here past midnight, with my laptop and a cigar and an argument running long, has its limits, just like everyone else’s.

If something in this piece resonated with you, and you’re inclined, a paid subscription is available, and it’s just the price of a cup of coffee a month-nothing more, nothing less.

No pressure either way, though. I’ll still be out here writing whether you do or not. That has never been the question for me.