Few organizations more richly deserve their humiliation.

It has been a rare day of nonstop media critique from me here on the Corner — what can I say, folks, it’s unexpectedly open season this week, and NR gave me a hunting license — and I wanted to end on perhaps the most meaningless postscript of them all. The White House Correspondents’ Association is up in arms about the Trump administration’s decision to yank the association’s privilege of credentialing White House press pool reporters. And in its high dudgeon, the association is telling on itself.

On a practical level, what this move means is that Trump’s staff now have the ability to govern press access to the president as well as anything else related to the White House, from press-conference seating arrangements to which outlets are even allowed to attend them in the first place. (Sorry, Associated Press, looks like it’s “Gulf of America” for you, or you can cover the president from a laptop screen like the rest of us pixel-stained wretches.)

Naturally, the WHCA — which has jealously guarded this guild prerogative for decades as the hydra-headed embodiment of the mainstream media’s chokehold on presidential access — is off its rocker about it. This is, we are told, yet another step towards Hitlerian fascism: “He’s creating his own sycophantic army of media minions!” goes the by-now predictable refrain from those upset about losing their privileges and sense of journalistic self-determination.

And, in theory, they have a case. It’s certainly true that, after taking control over which journalists get access to the president and his spokespeople, the Trump administration will introduce and favor friendly “new media” types unlikely to trouble it with the negative coverage. And if I believed our mainstream press was interested — outside of rare pockets of integrity — in upholding its 20th-century pretense of objectivity in political coverage this might have troubled me deeply. If I believed the media were even competent as adversaries, I might have sympathized with these laments.

But I don’t think I believe any of that anymore. I was broken in a very real way by the experience of the last four years, the experience of watching Joe Biden molder into mindless decrepitude in a way the public was acutely aware of but the media stridently ignored. The stridency of it is what was unforgivable: It was not enough for our mainstream betters to pretend that Biden was fine, or to arrogantly dismiss our concerns, they went much further than that and openly attacked anyone — even those of their own progressive tribe — who dared speak up about Biden’s clear deterioration. The White House Correspondents’ Association is outraged that it will no longer be allowed close access to the president or his White House staff. I can only shoot back with disgust: Well, what the hell did you do with all that access while you had it for the last four years?

We know the answer: They served the bidding of their party, not their nominal profession. Because for the vast majority of these people, the one folds seamlessly into the other. Well, now Donald Trump may replace them with an entirely new cast of similarly servile Good Party Men. I can’t really say that I think the caliber of investigative reporting coming from them on this administration will be noticeably worse than what the grandees of the White House Correspondents’ Association offered us over the last four years. I can think of few organizations that more richly deserve their humiliation.

And if it’s any consolation, the news mostly gets made on X and Truth Social these days, anyway.