A Bad Look
Eight years ago, I argued the White House Correspondents’ Dinner should end. The years since have only made the case stronger. And Saturday wasn’t even the worst part.
On Thursday night, two days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a different dinner happened a few blocks away. The host was David Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Paramount. Paramount is waiting on federal approval for a $111 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. The venue was the United States Institute of Peace, on the National Mall. The invitation, as Michael M. Grynbaum reported in the New York Times, described the event as “honoring the Trump White House.”
Sitting at Donald Trump’s table: Melania Trump. Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News (which Paramount owns). Nellie Bowles, who’s married to Weiss. Makan Delrahim, Paramount’s chief legal officer. And Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general.
Yes, that Todd Blanche. The one whose Justice Department is reviewing Paramount’s acquisition. The same antitrust division Delrahim used to run before Paramount hired him.
Around the rest of the room, per the Times: Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News. Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent. Nancy Cordes, its chief White House correspondent. Norah O’Donnell, the former Evening News anchor. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. And Weijia Jiang, a CBS White House correspondent who also happens to be the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
Trump talked for almost an hour. Several CBS journalists, the Times reported, were privately rattled that the dinner was happening at all.
Two nights later, Jiang walked to the front of a different ballroom and thanked Donald Trump for showing up. It was all, as they say, a bad look.
I made this argument in 2018
I was writing for Good at the time. The argument was straightforward: the White House Correspondents’ Association was founded in 1914 because journalists worried Woodrow Wilson would make it harder for them to cover his administration. They wanted a body that could fight back. A century later, that same body was throwing a black-tie gala where the people running the country sat at tables with the journalists who were supposed to be holding them accountable. Michelle Wolf had just told some jokes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The WHCA had apologized for them. The whole thing felt like a tradition that should have ended a long time ago.
I’d make the same argument today. With more receipts.
In the years since, Donald Trump has become president again and made suing news organizations into a hobby. He sued CBS over a 60 Minutes edit. He sued ABC over a Stephanopoulos line about E. Jean Carroll. He sued the Wall Street Journal over a birthday letter he allegedly sent Jeffrey Epstein. (A judge dismissed that one earlier this month. His lawyers said they’d refile.) He cut off the Associated Press’s White House access after the wire service wouldn’t follow his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. His administration defunded PBS and NPR. It dismantled Voice of America. It restricted press access to the Pentagon. CBS News, in the middle of all this, got a new editor-in-chief, the same Bari Weiss from Thursday’s table, whose tenure critics say has tilted the network’s coverage toward Trump.
And on Saturday, the WHCA threw him a dinner anyway.
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About the dinner itself
The entertainment for 2026 was Oz Pearlman. A mentalist. He spent part of his act trying to guess the name of press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s unborn child. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that the WHCA chose Pearlman “partly to sidestep the MAGA backlash that a Trump-zinging comic can cause.”
In 2018, the WHCA apologized for Michelle Wolf’s jokes after she told them. In 2026, they apologized in advance, by booking someone who wouldn’t make any.
Then Jiang opened the program. She thanked Trump for being there, and thanked press secretary Karoline Leavitt “for everything you and your team does to work with us every day, whether you like it or not.”
Whether you like it or not.
Almost 500 retired journalists, including Dan Rather and Jim Acosta, had signed a petition before the dinner calling on the WHCA to “forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump’s efforts to trample freedom of the press.” The WHCA’s response was that they were “happy” he’d accepted. Don Lemon publicly skipped. The Committee to Protect Journalists raised concerns. The New York Times has been boycotting the dinner for over a decade.
Trump came anyway, the WHCA welcomed him anyway, and partway through Pearlman’s act, a man with multiple weapons fired shots outside the ballroom screening area. An officer was struck in a bullet-resistant vest and is expected to recover. By Sunday morning, Trump had used the incident to push his White House ballroom project, posting that it “cannot be built fast enough.” Senate Republicans began moving to fast-track approval. PolitiFact is already flagging the press freedom problem with hosting future WHCDs on White House grounds.
It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House
Press trust is in the basement.
Per the most recent Gallup polling, only 28% of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in newspapers, TV, and radio. That’s a record low. In 2020, it was 40%. Seven in ten Americans now say they have “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%). Republicans are at 8%. Independents are at 27%. Democrats are the only group with a slim majority, at 51%, and that ties their previous low. With the press’s shift to the MAGA right in recent years, I’m curious to see how long the Democratic trust in news media holds up.
A black-tie dinner where journalists eat with the people they cover isn’t how you fix that. And it’s not unique to this administration. Stephen Colbert performed his famously hostile routine at the 2006 dinner with George W. Bush in the room. The Obama-era dinners turned the WHCD into a celebrity gala. The Biden version was tame and forgettable. None of those were okay either. But none of them happened with the editor-in-chief of CBS News sitting at the president’s table at a dinner thrown by the billionaire who owns CBS News while his federal merger review was pending.
The WHCA does some things that should keep going. It awards scholarships. It gives out journalism prizes. Both of those can happen without a tuxedo dinner where cabinet members are seated next to White House correspondents. They’ve never required it.
So end it.
Does this dinner do anything useful like raise money for scholarships for prospective journalist or support independent media?
Paramount will get what it wants out the dinner (among other things) while Trump and the Republicans have received more out of that tawdry affair than they could have imagined in their wildest dreams.