The Front Page, the 1928 Broadway comedy penned by ex-newsmen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, might be the most American story of the twentieth century. Mining the fraught workplace relationship between a star police beat reporter and his tyrannical editor, the witty, wisecracking play was a smash hit that inspired numerous film adaptations and stage revivals. My first point of contact was His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks’s 1940 take where ace reporter Rosalind Russell is the ex-wife of the bullying editor Cary Grant. Then it was the 1931 Lewis Milestone film with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien and later Billy Wilder’s 1974 version with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. In 2016, I saw the Broadhurst Theatre revival with Nathan Lane and John Slattery.

If the play had a subtitle, it would have to be “if it bleeds, it leads.” The entire setting is the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building that conveniently overlooks the gallows behind the Cook County Jail. Examiner reporter Hildy Johnson is resigning from the newspaper to get married and join the well-paid world of advertising, and his boss, Walter Burns, is trying to stop him from leaving. The fate that intervenes is the scheduled hanging just floors below of Earl Williams, a supposed Communist revolutionary (and a white man) convicted of killing a Black police officer. Williams escapes from the jail and—irony of ironies—the scoop of the century literally comes in through the press room window. When Hildy discovers Williams, the diminutive fugitive confides that (a) he’s not a revolutionary and (b) he only shot the officer by accident. Hildy then proceeds to hide him inside a rolltop desk.

The secret inside that rolltop might be fiction, but throughout the twentieth century, reporters have elevated the integrity of their vocation by hunting down the truth within jungles of secrets—whether it was who ordered the Watergate Hotel break-in or what The Pentagon Papers said about the Johnson administration’s objectives in Vietnam. Given this history, I find it crazy that no member of the “press” can find out if Mitch McConnell is alive.

Seriously, why? You’re telling me no reporter can get someone at the rehab facility to talk? You’re telling me we have a government that violates a new part of the Constitution daily but reporters live in mortal fear of a HIPPA violation? I have no doubt that press members with “access” know what’s going on with Mitch. The defense is usually that “my source won’t speak on record.” (Though if you’re Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, your sources will be OK if it’s for a bestselling book.) The right is always complaining about activist judges and a biased mainstream press. What we need is an activist press that goes out and finds things under rocks.

Instead we have a couple generations of showboaters—people so dedicated to their craft that even a would-be presidential assassin couldn’t stop them from showboating at the rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner. Jon Stewart called out the group’s absurd hypocrisy and normalization of fascism by inviting Donald Trump to their “annual celebration of the First Amendment.” Margaret Sullivan called it “a predictable disgrace,” citing Trump’s “lack of respect for the role of the free press. The lack of respect for the U.S. Constitution, which forbids a Trump run for president in 2028. The lack of respect for the rule of law.”

To its credit, the New York Times stopped participating in the dinner years ago. But that ethical call is fairly meaningless for a paper that regularly sanitizes Trump’s behavior. (I wrote about the Times in this regard here and here.) I’m still processing this headline they ran after Lindsey Graham’s death: “How a Grieving Trump Decided to Back Lindsey Graham’s Sister for Senate.” Not only did this “grieving” man make Graham’s eulogy all about himself; when he passed the casket, he actually tapped it with his knuckles, “like a waiter who’s just taken your order on fifty-cent wings night at TGI Fridays.”

The White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) should never have invited Trump in the first place, but more important, they need to retire this outdated and compromised affair. What “tradition” do they think they’re being loyal to? The dinner began as a blustery boys’ club affair in 1921, during the presidency of Warren Harding, who’d likely have been prosecuted in the Teapot Dome scandal if he hadn’t died in office in 1923. The 1920s were a schizoid decade of Prohibition and drunken debutantes, but also of racism and xenophobia. You had the scapegoating and execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; the Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe; and the infamous 1925 parade in the nation’s capital where 30,000 robed Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. Some of these tensions show up in The Front Page, which predated the stock market crash by a year. The WHCA Dinner needs to be retired as a relic of that justice-challenged decade.

Will that happen? It’s hard to say if the press will ever regain its footing. Every day the White House press pool asks Trump the same lame questions about the Iran War and dutifully allows the senile idiot to hijack any relevant narrative with his lie-ridden rambling. Look at these two “journalists” nod respectfully as Trump explains to the room what a Tomahawk missile is—a weapon the U.S. military has been using since 1983.

On August 5, Trump brazenly announced: “We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela—billions and billions of barrels of oil. To the victor belong the spoils.” Where was the press asking him where the revenue from the sale of that oil has gone? When, in July, Trump finally paid E. Jean Carroll the $5.6 million a jury ordered after finding him liable for sexually abusing and defaming her, no one in the presidential gaggle even brought it up to him.

Why doesn’t someone ask: “We’ve noticed that you’ve been falling asleep quite frequently during televised events. Are you getting enough sleep at night?” And why do they go along with the childish or Big Brother ways he names things? They should’ve never parroted his phrase “Big Beautiful Bill” or Todd Blanche’s description of the $1.8 billion insurrectionist slush fund as an “anti-weaponization fund.”

It’s not like they don’t have the capacity to be real reporters. In June, we watched NBC’s Kristen Welker get under Trump’s skin during a Meet the Press interview. When questioned about his lies regarding California’s elections and January 6th, Trump called her crooked, threw the mic, and walked out of the interview. And yet there she was at the WHCA Dinner, schmoozing with Stephen Miller of all trolls.

We are living through a truly strange moment as Trump’s decisions continue to hurt his MAGA base and he makes no effort to mitigate. There’s a MAGA core who will never disown him, but most Republicans outside of Congress are done with him. Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones want him impeached. This is a fast-moving current, and yet the legacy press is already bored with the narrative of Trump’s decline. What they’ve embraced instead—and with wanton vigor—is the Republicans’ fear-mongering about the Democratic Socialists of America. Rather than frame the recent primary victories as “something about America is drawing voters to the message of socialism,” they’re bludgeoning the Democrats for allowing “radicals” to take over the party.

While the mainstream press has always maintained a comically nonjudgmental (and practically affirmative-action) mindset about the right-wing populism that led to MAGA, it feels no need to hide its sneering disregard for left-wing populism. It props up notions that the DSA is composed of people who don’t have the work ethic to get ahead (the Republican take) or the smarts to leverage all available resources (the “moderate” Democrat take). It’s no secret that CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are more worried about the DSA than they ever were about MAGA.

The front page of a print newspaper has long ceased to be the source of news, but the national fixations of the 1928 play are oddly relevant today, especially the scapegoating of anyone advocating for the rights of workers as a “communist.” The Republicans’ resurrected use of this word in 2026 is crazy—almost as crazy as there not being a single reporter willing to break the story on Mitch. §