A journalist's note to President Trump: Don't be so shy
Those good old days came to mind when your health care repeal-and-replace bill collapsed in the House. You called Robert Costa at the Washington Post and Haberman at the Times before giving remarks to a larger pool of reporters. In those calls you shifted blame to Democrats for the bill's failure, ignoring the Republicans who control both houses.
No wonder you love to bash the media. We're the perfect scapegoats. Aside from the courts, the nation's free press is just about the only major institution left that you or your party doesn't control. When it's time to shift blame, where else can you go?
That's as good -- or bad -- of a reason as any to explain why you skipped the annual dinner of the 103-year-old White House Correspondents Association, the first president to do so since Ronald Reagan, who had a good excuse. He had just been shot the previous month in a failed assassination attempt.
Your shyness was odd, considering how, as the Times' Glenn Thrush noted, your "free-ranging press conferences" have been "a lot more democratic" than President Barack Obama's tightly controlled face-offs -- with their single-page lists of pre-selected reporters.
But, after watching you in October at New York's Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a campaign year ritual, I can see why you wanted to shy away from the black-tie correspondent's dinner -- as well as the annual white-tie dinner of the Gridiron Club, Washington's oldest media organization, a month earlier.
At the Smith dinner, your good-natured verbal jousts with your Democratic rival Hillary Clinton kept with the dinner's tradition but soured as your remarks turned nasty enough to elicit boos. Yes, sir, you were bombing long before you sent missiles into Syria.
But after a couple of decades of watching presidents from both parties deliver funny speeches at the city's spring press dinners, I have to borrow one of your favorite Twitter words to describe your absence: sad.
It's not that we who attended the correspondents' dinner didn't have a good time without you. We did. But it's a sad commentary on our times that our president would rather drive more wedges between the media and the audiences that we serve than to take some time to strengthen his own relationship with us.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
