NBC News, MS NOW Stop White House Correspondents’ Dinners
WASHINGTON – Mentalist Oz Pearlman was expected to dazzle hundreds of spectators with mind tricks here Saturday evening in a well-lit hotel ballroom. Instead, he found himself doing his act in front of a small handful of media executives in a darkened underground event space around midnight.
MS NOW planned to host a festive soirée at the site of an old underground trolley station in the heart of the nation’s capital, as part of its usual post-annual White House Correspondents Dinner duties. This year was shaping up to be more promising — until horror struck just hours earlier: Authorities are still investigating an incident in which a man was able to get close to a room at the Washington Hilton where President Donald Trump was expected to be present — and deliver pointed remarks — to a collection of journalists, news executives, media honchos and government officials during a celebration of journalism intertwined with the social agenda of this city dedicated to the federal government.
President Trump and those in attendance were unhurt, but many were shocked by an eruption of shots and the reminder that political violence seems more likely to erupt in the US than at any other time in recent history.
With that in mind, media organizations that supported traditional afterparties worked on the ground to change their purpose.
“While tonight’s event won’t be what we originally intended, we still think it’s important to provide a space where friends and colleagues can be together,” MS NOW said in a message emailed to guests for a celebration intended as an expanded debut of sorts: The news channel is no longer part of NBC News and is now a flagship of Versant Media, spun off from NBCUniversal earlier this year.
Meanwhile, NBC News opted to move forward with a long-running after-event, deciding participants could use a place to gather, gather and process.
After the gunshots it could no longer be bacchanalian as usual. NBC News host Tom Llamas broke into regular programming on NBC with a special report, and many of the news organization’s top executives quietly left the main meeting at the residence of the French ambassador to the United States, according to a person familiar with the matter, to watch their team’s efforts in a makeshift monitor room.
The tone of both parties was muted. Each felt designed to accommodate a larger audience that may not feel comfortable enough to attend. And commuting between the two events became difficult: Washington police closed parts of Connecticut Avenue, a main artery in the city, making a direct route between the events impassable.
Still, people had to talk – about what they saw and heard, about the reasons why it happened, and about how things could have been much worse.
During the MS NOW meeting, Pearlman performed his feats in front of Versant Media CEO Mark Lazarus and CNBC President KC Sullivan, among others. Still, some of the hoopla was toned down, although a series of projections on the wall detailing ties to the First Amendment were underscored by the evening’s events.
NBC News, meanwhile, played host to journalists and staffers, including anchors and correspondents such as Lester Holt, Christine Romans and Joanna Stern. Executives including Cesar Conde, president of the company’s news operations, and Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC News chief editorial officer, also worked to navigate the evening.
On the streets of Washington, news of the alarming development spread through discussions with taxi drivers and through overheard comments from tuxedo-wearing attendees who blurted out comments in smartphone conversations as they walked away from the dinner’s original location.
President Trump said Saturday evening that he hoped to reconvene the dinner within 30 days. In several conversations, partygoers seemed unsure that the dinner could be put together in such a short time.
After all, even a mentalist like Pearlman can’t make people forget what happened.
