Over the weekend, the White House Correspondents’ Association abruptly canceled the performance of comedian Amber Ruffin, originally scheduled for the organization’s April 26 annual dinner. Once a celebrity-filled pageant of Washington journalists and politicians, the dinner has struggled to find equilibrium and meaning since the first election of President Donald Trump in 2016. Trump, the target of years of overwhelmingly hostile coverage from many of the dinner’s attendees, has never attended the event as president and does not plan to go this year.

Ruffin had promised to make the dinner a Trump-hating extravaganza. In an interview with CNN on Feb. 28, she said she did not want Trump to attend. “No one wants that,” Ruffin said. “I don’t know that anyone’s looking forward to being in the same room as him.”

Ruffin also said that when she talked to other show business types, they advised her, “You have to make fun of everybody. You can’t just make fun of the people you disagree with. You have to spread it out evenly.” Ruffin said she considered their words but decided “I’m not going to do that.”

That was OK with the WHCA, or at least it was OK with it in February. When the organization’s president, Eugene Daniels, who has recently become an MSNBC host, chose Ruffin for the job, he said her “unique talents are the ideal fit for this current political and cultural climate.” Ruffin was at the “top of my list,” Daniels said, because “she has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day.” Daniels pronounced himself “thrilled and honored she said yes.”

Clearly something happened between Feb. 4, when Daniels issued that statement, and March 29, when the WHCA announced that Ruffin would no longer perform.

Last Thursday, Ruffin appeared on a podcast produced by the anti-Trump publication Daily Beast. She was asked if she knows which, if any, Trump administration officials might attend the dinner. She said she did not really care, because she cared about more important things, like that the Trump administration is “kind of a bunch of murderers.” When she said that the dinner’s organizers had told her, “You need to be equal and make sure that you give it to both sides,” she responded, “There’s no way I’m going to be freaking doing that, dude. Under no circumstances.”

That wasn’t any different from what Ruffin told CNN a month earlier, but perhaps it attracted more attention because the dinner is a bit closer now. In any event, Taylor Budowich, a senior White House official, saw Ruffin’s comments and posted a response: “This year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner will be hosted by a second-rate comedian who is previewing the event by calling this administration ‘murderers’ who want to ‘feel like human beings, but they shouldn’t get to feel that way, because you’re not.’ What kind of responsible, sensible journalist would attend something like this? More importantly, what kind of company would sponsor such a hate-filled and violence-inspiring event?”

The next day, Daniels sent a note to WHCA members. Ruffin was out, and the dinner itself was being re-thought. “For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year,” Daniels wrote. “As a first step, I wanted to share that the WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year. At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists.”

What was going on? Daniels went from saying that Ruffin was the “ideal fit for this current political and cultural climate” to dumping her from the dinner. Without reading the minds of Daniels and the association board, here is one possibility:

The incident was obviously the latest in the dinner’s, and the media’s, very troubled relationship with Trump. But more specifically, these particular events threatened many journalists’ cherished view that their reporting is fair. You, as a news consumer, might think that view is ridiculous, but it means a lot to them.

When Daniels first announced the Ruffin hire on Feb. 4, in addition to saying she was the “ideal fit,” he also said that her perspective “will fit right in with the dinner’s tradition of honoring the freedom of the press while roasting the most powerful people on all sides of the aisle and the journalists who cover them.”

Then Ruffin came along and said – publicly, definitively and on multiple occasions – that she would not even pretend to be fair and balanced. She was going to bash Trump and would not devote equal time to bashing anyone else.

With that, Ruffin took a big swing at the media’s sacred notion that it does its job fairly and without political bias. If the WHCA kept her on the program, it would be endorsing her view and also giving Trump one more data point for his very long and very persuasive case that the media is biased against him. Better to cut her loose and hang on, however tenuously, to the self-image of an impartial press.

What will happen now? Well, at least the dinner won’t have a comedian, which, given some performances in the past, might be a good thing. But the event will raise a fundamental question for the media: Why are we doing this? Long before Trump, there were critics who advocated ending the dinner, calling it an unseemly and borderline-appropriate Washington ritual. That was true – perhaps especially so – at a time when journalists mostly loved the president, like the Obama years. Then the dinner was a train wreck for the four years of Trump’s first administration. Now it promises to be more of the same. Why go through it?

This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3364928/annual-white-house-correspondents-dinner-fiasco-trump-ruffin/.