The White House Correspondents' Dinner Redo Is an Affront to a Free Press
When the president is attacking journalists, he shouldn't be a guest of honor at media events.
“He’s not Putin. And this is not Russia,” Jim Acosta, former White House correspondent for CNN, said of Donald Trump. Acosta is sending a strong message before the latest attempt for a 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a Friday night redo of the April 26 event marred by gunfire at the Washington Hilton Hotel.
Acosta is one of the most prominent of many White House correspondents who has unwillingly been pulled into public and ongoing altercations with Trump. A U.S district court judge is hearing arguments today over subpoenas of New York Times journalists who broke the news that the new, Qatari-gifted Air Force One had security issues while the president was overseas at a time of war. New York Times lawyers are arguing that the government is abusing the legal system and violating First Amendment protections.
The White House Correspondents’ Association officially condemned the Trump administration’s subpoenas. But the Justice Department only escalated existing tensions between the executive branch and the free press.
The clarion call for an independent free press — established by our founding fathers to create another level of accountability for those in power — will again be sounded in front of Trump at tomorrow’s dinner. Acosta, now an independent journalist, will not be in attendance for the dinner redo. “My strong preference would be that we in the press not invite Trump to the correspondents’ dinner at all. But now that he’s coming, a strong message must be delivered in defense of a strong free and independent press,” he said. Since the last dinner in April, the Contrarian and other media have charted some of the most glaring press encounters with Trump.
On NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump challenged the journalistic integrity and the intelligence of Kristen Welker, the Harvard-educated host, by saying to her, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” just before storming out of their interview. The NAACP and the National Association of Black Journalists spoke out in defense of Welker. Less than a week before that, the president verbally attacked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in the Oval Office, saying she didn’t “smile” and he could see “hatred” coming from her. He appeared to have called Rachel Scott the b-word after she asked him a question he didn’t like. Helen Thomas, the late “dean” of the White House press corps, would say all questions are fair because everything from war to peace and everything in between comes to the White House.
Trump is especially vicious with women, and even more so with women of color. His tirades against anchors and White House reporters are derogatory, misogynistic, unprofessional, and expletive-laden.
So why is the White House Correspondents’ Association planning a redo of its annual dinner — and why is Trump still invited?
And, more to the point, why isn’t the association defending its journalists? No matter whether male or female, gay or straight, the press is there to do a job that is enshrined in the foundational document of this country, the Constitution. Yet none of these attacks has been addressed, admonished, or condemned by the Correspondents’ Association.
Scott Pelley, who was fired from CBS’s 60 Minutes after he accused his bosses of kowtowing to Trump, said in an interview, ”There’s no democracy without the press!” Pelley is absolutely right — which is why Trump is working to dismantle every part of the traditional free press. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press because it provides accountability when the three branches of our government fail to act as checks and balances on each other, as they are now. And when a president, working with a compliant court and a supplicant majority in Congress, is attacking reporters and interfering in news operations, we cannot stay silent.
Holding a second dinner while the president is verbally berating its members and undermining what should be independent media is tone deaf. For the sake of informing the American people, this has to end.
I was on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association during the Obama years. But I am not surprised by the board’s recalcitrant approach here. It didn’t stand up for journalists, including me, who were similarly attacked in the president’s first term. Still, the White House Correspondents’ Association should remember that it is duty-bound to protect its dues-paying members — not the president’s ego.
April Ryan, host of The Contrarian’s The Tea With April Ryan, is the longest-serving Black woman reporter in the White House press corps. She is the author of “Black Women Will Save the World,” “The Presidency in Black and White: My Up-Close View of Three Presidents and Race in America,” “Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House,” and “At Mama’s Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White.”
One of the top rules of journalism is: tell the story, don't be the story. So there is a strong instinct not to "be the story" through criticism of the president's (or anybody's) relationship with the press or with individual reporters. But it's time to get past that and defend fellow reporters from personal attacks.
Apparently, "access" to the White House is more important to the WHCA than actual journalism.
If speakers at the dinner use the occasion to publicly call Trump out for his anti-American attacks on the press, that would at least be putting the occasion to some decent use.
But everything associated with Trump is immediately soiled beyond redemption. His one and only genius is to make everything about him. I would expect him to storm out partway through any honest speechifying. Which would result in his cult members screaming about how "disrespectful" and "rude" the media are to him.
So the point about threats to American rights will once again be lost to the right-wing noise machine, most likely. I would not have rolled the dice, but I guess we'll just have to watch the results.