Hundreds of veteran journalists and press groups on Monday urged the White House Correspondents’ Association to confront Donald Trump over what they called his sustained assault on the free press, days before he is set to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time as president. The letter said the dinner cannot be business as usual with the press standing up to applaud the man who attacks them on a daily basis.
The signers asked the association to speak forcefully in front of the man who seeks to undermine the country’s long tradition of an independent, strong and free press. Among those backing the appeal were Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson and Ann Curry, along with the Society of Professional Journalists, the Radio Television Digital News Foundation and the National Association of Black Journalists. Their message was blunt: Trump’s presence at the Saturday dinner is, in their view, a profound contradiction of the event’s purpose.
The correspondence comes as the dinner remains sold out this year and at least one outlet, The HuffPost, is boycotting it. Whitney Snyder said, “We refuse to celebrate journalism and share laughs with a ruler who holds such a dreadful record.” Major media outlets once touted their dinner guests in the weeks before the event, but some networks are not doing that this year, and there is expected to be a heavy presence of administration figures sitting at media tables.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has long been cast as a symbol of the First Amendment and the journalists who uphold it, and in years past the WHCA president often used the president’s appearance to press a media-access issue or another dispute. This year’s letter went further, citing bans on access for some outlets, including the, coercive regulatory investigations launched by the president’s FCC chairman, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists, verbal attacks, assaults on the media in White House releases and social media posts, arrests of journalists and pardons for people who committed violence against the press.
That list is why the dinner now carries a sharper edge than the usual Washington spectacle. If Trump takes the room on Saturday, the question will not be whether the event can pretend to be nonpartisan; it is whether the journalists who built it are willing to treat his attendance as a normal photo-op after calling his record the most systematic and comprehensive assault on press freedom by a sitting American president.
