WASHINGTON — Mentalist Oz Pearlman was supposed to dazzle an audience of hundreds on Saturday night here with mind tricks in a well-lit hotel ballroom. Instead he found himself doing his act for a small handful of media executives in a darkened underground event space close to midnight.
MS NOW had planned to host a festive soirée in the site of an old subterranean trolley station in the heart of the nation’s capital, part of the usual proceedings following the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. This year was going to be more auspicious — until horror struck just hours earlier: Authorities are still investigating an incident in which a man was able to get close to a space in the Washington Hilton where President Donald Trump was to attend — and deliver pointed remarks — to an assemblage of journalists, news executives, media honchos and government officials at a celebration of journalism that is woven into the social calendar of this city devoted to the federal government.
President Trump and attendees were unharmed, but many were shaken by an outburst of shots and the reminder that political violence seems more prone to break out in the U.S. than at any other time in recent memory.
With that in mind, media organizations backing traditional after-parties worked on the fly to change their purpose.
“While tonight’s event won’t be what we originally intended, we still think it is important to provide a space for friends and colleagues to be together,” MS NOW said in a dispatch emailed to guests for a party that was meant to serve as an elaborate debut of sorts: The news outlet is no longer part of NBC News, and is now a flagship outlet of Versant Media, spun off from NBCUniversal earlier this year.
Meanwhile, NBC News opted to continue with a long-held after-event, deciding that attendees could use a place to gather, convene and process.
After the gunshots, it couldn’t be bacchanal as usual. NBC News anchor 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 gathering at the residence of France’s Ambassador to the United States, according to a person familiar with the matter, to watch their team’s effort in a makeshift monitor room.
The tone of both parties was subdued. Each felt designed to accommodate a larger crowd that might not feel comfortable enough to attend. And shuttling back and forth between the two events became onerous: Washington police closed down parts of Connecticut Avenue, a main artery in the city, making a direct route between the events impassable.
Still, people needed to talk — about what they saw and heard, about the reasons why it happened, and about how things could have been much worse.
At the MS NOW gathering, Pearlman performed his feats for Versant Media CEO Mark Lazarus and CNBC President KC Sullivan, among others. Still, some of the hoopla was dialed down, though a series of projections on the wall that described ties to the First Amendment were underscored by the events of the evening.
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, chairman of the company’s news operations, and Rebecca Blumenstein, president of editorial for NBC News, were also working to navigate the evening.
In the streets of Washington, word of the alarming development spread through discussions with rideshare drivers and in the overheard comments of tuxedoed attendees who blurted out comments in smartphone conversations while walking away from the original site of the dinner.
President Trump said Saturday evening that he hoped to reconvene the dinner within 30 days’ time. In various conversations, party-goers seemed uncertain the dinner could be reconstituted in such a short period of time.
Even a mentalist like Pearlman, after all, can’t make people forget what transpired.
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