The media can’t hide behind ‘we’ forever

Following the recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, there was an immediate and predictable rush to the microphones.

“We need to tone it down.” “We need to be better.” “We need to lower the temperature.”

The statements came almost reflexively, as if the script had already been written.

The same people now saying “we” have spent years writing and rehearsing the very script they now decry.

It brought to mind a scene from “Blazing Saddles,” when Governor William J. Lepetomane gathers his Cabinet and declares, “We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen,” prompting a chorus of obedient “harrumphs.” When one man fails to join in, he is immediately called out for it.

That scene was meant to be absurd, but it’s hard to laugh when it looks so familiar.

The chorus we hear now from the media is not all that different. The language is more polished, the setting more formal, but the substance is the same. A unified sound, carefully rehearsed, that spreads responsibility so broadly that no one person has to carry it.

“We need to tone it down.”

Who is “we”?

The rush to say “we need to tone it down” or that “both sides” must do so reveals something else. The media knows it has a credibility problem. What it refuses to admit is that it has an ownership problem as well.

“We” is a convenient word to hide behind. The same people now saying “we” have spent years writing and rehearsing the very script they now decry. They used language that casts opponents as existential threats, invoking terms like “Hitler” and “fascist” as routine descriptors rather than historically loaded warnings.

That kind of language does not stay contained. It shapes how listeners understand the stakes. It tells them that what they are seeing is not a mere disagreement, but a moral emergency. And when everything is framed as a moral emergency, there will always be someone who hears that not as metaphor but as instruction.

That does not excuse the person who acts. Responsibility for violence remains personal. But it does expose the gap between those who help set the tone and those who later step forward to warn about it.

The problem is the distance built into the language.

What would it sound like if that distance were removed? Not “we need to dial it back,” but “I do.” Not “we have to be more careful,” but “I have not been careful.” That kind of sentence lands differently because it costs something. It does not distribute the burden. It accepts it.

I did not learn that lesson in Washington. I learned it as a caregiver. There are days when everything is compressed at once, when the routine collapses, the body gives out, and the phone rings at precisely the wrong moment. On those days, it is easy to feel as though everything is being dumped on me. Sometimes that is true.

But caregiving has a way of stripping away illusions, including the ones I prefer to keep about myself.

Because while there are days when I feel like the statue, I have had to admit that there are other days when I am the pigeon — not because I set out to do harm, but because I make impatient decisions in the middle of exhaustion, speak more sharply than I should, or try, in subtle ways, to elevate myself at someone else’s expense.

That does not excuse it. One does not get a free pass to be an ass.

Washington has a hypocrisy problem. The media has a credibility problem. I have done the same thing in smaller rooms with lower stakes and fewer cameras. I have used tone, timing, and words to shift blame, to justify myself, to make someone else carry what was mine to own. That recognition has steadied me more than any sweeping call for “all of us” to do better.

I am not in a position to correct a culture that rewards outrage and then feigns surprise when it produces consequences. But I am in a position to confront myself with the truth.

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First-person plural spreads the blame until it disappears. First-person singular removes the cover. And once the cover is gone, something else becomes possible: repentance.

Not “we will do better,” but “I will do better.”

That is where leadership begins. Not on a stage or behind a podium, not in a ballroom full of cameras, but in the quiet decision of a single person to own what is his to own.

Life, whether it unfolds in Washington or in a hospital room, is shaped the same way — one voice, one decision, one sentence at a time. Which means it can only be corrected the same way. Not “we.” But “I.”