Indeed, as you may have heard, CBS’s overtures to the administration have amplified many insiders’ latent misgivings about the network’s direction under David and Bari. They’ve also given the broader Washington press corps a focal point for its anxieties about Trump’s own attendance at this year’s dinner. As Oliver Darcy, the industry’s most reliable chronicler of this genre, put it: “Why should the WHCA honor a president who demonizes journalism itself?” In the absence of a compelling answer, the press corps’ brave solution to this dilemma has been to wear pins honoring the freedom of the press. Oliver is also selling shirts.

Unsurprisingly, none of this handwringing has fazed David or Bari, both of whom seem to appreciate the strategic imperative of keeping the president in their good graces and are enjoying the light buzz of keeping the Washington gossip circuit in full throttle. David, of course, is on the precipice of acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, while his father, Larry, just landed majority control of TikTok’s U.S. operations in a sweetheart deal. Bari, meanwhile, is quite obviously trying to pull CBS News toward an imagined center of the political spectrum, where 70 percent of Americans allegedly don’t care whether the president is attending the annual Nerd Prom. The existence of this mythical “70 percent” isn’t exactly borne out by the polling data, but we don’t need to litigate that here. Nor do we need to point out that most of them are already consuming news and media from nontraditional sources who largely scratch this itch—and who have been doing it for so long that the opportunity for Bari probably no longer exists. (Just sayin’…)

Fourth-estate purists have ample reason to bemoan Bari’s plan, but they shouldn’t ignore the strategic rationale, either. In TV news, only Fox has fortress business strategies, and David has enlisted Bari to play for that audience. In fact, despite her rocky start in the C-suite, I was told this week that he still hopes she can help CNN earn some of that audience after Paramount acquires WBD. Not only would that elicit veritable war crimes in Hudson Yards, but it might also overestimate her affinity for the medium. Tony Dokoupil’s Evening News continues to plumb new depths in the ratings; last week, it averaged 3.8 million viewers, and less than 500,000 in the demo. But surely there are many other more-subtle ways of courting an administration than by inviting two of its most aggressive press critics to your table. (Though, yes, I’m sure they’ve considered some of those paths, too.) Fox News, I’m told, will host D.H.S. Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and U.S. attorney and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro—none of whom, for what it’s worth, loom quite so large in the nightmares of the national press corps. But if you’re trying to signal your editorial shift to both the president and the general public, subtlety isn’t really the point. (On a related note, Brendan Carr, the F.C.C. chair with a penchant for threatening broadcasters, is also attending this year’s dinner—a guest not of CBS or Paramount, he told me, but Gray TV, a local broadcast group.) It’s unclear, however, what all this signaling actually does for CBS News. Fox didn’t build its success on proximity to power, but rather ideological clarity. Meanwhile, it’s not obvious whether Bari’s CBS is truly motivated by a nonpartisan ideal or her own heterodox whims—or, sometimes, simply a desire to flip off the sanctimonious crowd that will outnumber her at the Hilton on Saturday night. Either way, the veteran correspondents and producers who came up in the pre-Trump era of center-left institutional neutrality are going to have a tough time squaring their own instincts with a leadership team that seems increasingly comfortable blurring the lines between access, optics, and strategy. And yet, as David and Bari see it, if they’re really uncomfortable with that, they can take their pins and leave.