Even in the best of times, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an awkward and ethically fraught affair. Journalists spend the evening partying with the president and administration officials whom they’re supposed to cover rigorously and skeptically. I’ve been to the dinner several times over the years. It’s typically crowded and a little chaotic, and the ratio of non-journalists to journalists is about 10 to 1. The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.These aren’t the best of times for White House correspondents or, for that matter, the First Amendment. And this year’s gala figures to be even more awkward and embarrassing than usual.After declining all invitations to the event throughout his years in office, President Trump informed the White House Correspondents’ Association last month that he would be attending this year’s dinner. His surprising decision sets up a bizarre dynamic: On Saturday night, the president will break bread with the same people he’s spent a decade calling “fake” and “enemies of the people.”[Andrew Ferguson: A republic too fractured to be funny]Trump easily qualifies as the most anti-press president in the dinner’s 105-year history. In just the past 15 months, he has sued news organizations, threatened to jail journalists, and repeatedly suggested taking broadcast licenses away from TV networks that have reported stories he didn’t like. His administration has defunded NPR and PBS, hobbled Voice of America, and driven mainstream journalists out of the Pentagon. A few weeks after Trump assumed office last year, his administration took control of the White House press pool, enabling the president to dictate who covers him when he’s inside the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or at Mar-a-Lago. The WHCA, which had selected pool members for decades, objected to being pushed aside. The White House ignored its protests.This state of affairs raises two questions: What explains Trump’s change of heart about attending the dinner? And why was he invited in the first place?The second question is the easier one to answer. The WHCA has always invited the president to its annual dinner; Calvin Coolidge became the first chief executive to show up in 1924. Trump has accordingly been invited every year that he’s been president, including last year, after he commandeered the press pool. Trump’s motives for accepting the invitation, however, are harder to parse. During his… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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