In response to the Trump administration’s hostility towards the press, Samantha Bee will be hosting an event on the same night as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Proceeds from Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner will benefit the Committee to Protect Journalists. Although White House Correspondents’ Association president Jeff Mason told the Hollywood Reporter that the event will happen as planned, Bee told the publication that she suspects “it will either get called off or it will be the most sinister awkward thing you’ve ever seen.”
Caitlyn Jenner will be co-writing her memoir with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Buzz Bissinger, who also wrote the Vanity Fair cover story on Jenner’s transition. The Secrets of My Life will be published by Trapeze in April.
After management voluntarily recognized an employee union last year, the Huffington Post ratified its first union contract yesterday. Changes include across-the-board raises, new minimum salaries, and severance pay. In a statement, the bargaining committee called the new contract an example of “what a newsroom can accomplish when it decides to come together and bargain collectively.”
Three more journalists who were charged with felony rioting while covering Inauguration Day protests have had their charges dropped. RT America reporter Alexander Rubinstein, Story of America producer Jack Keller, and freelance journalist Matthew Hopard were facing prison sentences of up to ten years, along with fines of $25,000. Freelance journalists Shay Horse and Aaron Cantú still have charges pending.
At the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo writes that social media is becoming a weapon of the resistance against Trump. Manjoo looks at the “instantaneous” protests that were organized after Trump’s executive order on immigration, and how the media—once Trump’s favorite propaganda machine—is now being used against him. “Throughout the campaign, the bigger a spectacle he created, the larger he loomed in the public consciousness,” Manjoo writes. “What has been remarkable during the last two weekends is how thoroughly Mr. Trump’s own media personage was blotted out by scenes of protesters.”
In the wake of Trump’s executive order, Porochista Khakpour reflects on coming to the US with her family from Iran as a child, her life as an academic, and the possibility of once more becoming a refugee. Khakpour writes of rumors that Trump’s next move will target naturalized citizens like her, and likens the fear to what she experienced after 9/11. Khakpour writes that she spent Friday evening “reading news articles, crying, and wondering: What is going to happen to this country, what will they do to my other country? You can be a refugee once, I’ve always thought, but how to be one twice?”