Trump Will Be First President In 36 Years To Skip White House Correspondents Dinner

Trump Will Be First President In 36 Years To Skip White House Correspondents Dinner

February 25, 20178:01 PM ET

Maquita Peters
Domenico Montanaro

President Trump announced Saturday afternoon that he would break from a decades-old tradition and skip the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner scheduled for April 29.

"I will not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!" Trump tweeted.

The annual dinner, sometimes referred to — affectionately and derisively — in Washington as "Nerd Prom," honors journalism with awards and scholarships. The president is a major a draw to help in those efforts. What began in 1921 as a simple awards dinner evolved into a highly glamorized affair that attracted Hollywood stars.

The last president to not attend the dinner was Ronald Reagan in 1981. But he had a pretty good reason — he was recovering from being shot in an assassination attempt. Reagan did phone into the event and even joked about the shooting. "If I could give you just one little bit of advice," Reagan said from Camp David, the presidential retreat, "when somebody tells you to get in a car quick, do it."

He signed off with a light ribbing of the news media. "Well, I'm looking forward to the next news conference," he said. "I have so many questions to ask you all."

The last president to outright skip the event was Richard Nixon in 1972. Nixon warned the press he'd do so and followed through. Trump called the press the "enemy of the American people," in a tweet recently. That echoes Nixon, who told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "The press is your enemy."

Trump's announcement comes at a moment of high tension between the White House and many news organizations. Trump has made attacking mainstream news organizations a staple of his public remarks. Trump and his White House have accused the New York Times, CNN and others of being an "opposition party" with which he is at war.

In response to Trump's tweet, the White House Correspondents' Association President Jeff Mason issued the following statement:

"The White House Correspondents' Association looks forward to having its annual dinner on April 29. The WHCA takes note of President Donald Trump's announcement on Twitter that he does not plan to attend the dinner, which has been and will continue to be a celebration of the First Amendment and the important role played by an independent news media in a healthy republic. We look forward to shining a spotlight at the dinner on some of the best political journalism of the past year and recognizing the promising students who represent the next generation of our profession."

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon on Thursday reiterated that the press was the "opposition party" at the Conservative Political Action Conference; Trump himself devoted a significant portion of his CPAC speech Friday to attacking the "fake news" media; and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer gave access for a briefing to a group of mostly conservative-leaning news organizations that same day while shutting out some mainstream organizations.

The correspondents' dinner has been a place where the inevitable tension between the president and press is mostly put aside after a roasting. The president usually takes on the press corps in a light-hearted way before acknowledging its important role in a democracy — and the president in turn takes a ribbing from a famous comedian who headlines the night.

But in recent weeks, as relations between the White House and the news media has grown more strained, several news organizations have announced plans to not attend this year's dinner. Buzzfeed reported that CNN, which Trump has been pointedly attacking, might boycott, and Bloomberg canceled hosting a planned after party, a longtime feature of the event in collaboration with Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair had pulled out earlier.

NPR and most other news organizations are still planning to attend.

Some news outlets, like The New York Times, have been skipping the event for years because, in part, of charges of the event depicting journalists as being too chummy with the president.

CBS's Major Garrett, the network's chief White House correspondent and a former board member of the correspondents' association, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which he said he thought it was a bad idea for the press to skip the event. He concluded:

"If Trump represents a genuine threat to press freedoms, then foregoing the dinner doesn't change a thing. The right response, instead, is for reporters and news organizations to redouble their commitment to a WHCA dinner built around the journalism of the present and of the future."

According to WHCA website, the dinner has been held every year since 1921.

"The 50 men who gathered in the Arlington Hotel at Vermont Avenue and L Street on the north side of McPherson Square that evening could not have known that they were initiating a Washington tradition, one that would annually draw 2,600 people and a national audience a century later. It was Saturday, May 7, 1921 and this was the first White House Correspondents' Association Dinner."

There have been plenty of controversies surrounding presidents, yet they still attended, from the Iran-Contra weapons scandal in the 1980s during the Reagan administration to the Clinton impeachment. Bill Clinton attended all eight years, including before and after his 1998 impeachment following the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The first president to attend was Calvin Coolidge in 1924. For years, the dinner had been headlined by cabaret singers and entertainers. The comedic roast didn't become a staple until 1983, but it has grown in popularity since, drawing together the odd couple of celebrities and the political news media.

http://www.npr.org/2017/02/25/517257...espondents-din

I was so glad to hear this. I was thinking a couple of weeks ago that he shouldn't participate in this correspondents dinner. It shouldn't even be called the White House Correspondents Dinner to begin with. It should be called something else.

We should have something else like White House New Jobs and Industry Awards Dinner. Something you know, IMPORTANT. We should honor these companies who have made commitments to come home, who are expanding their plants in the United States, building new ones in our country and hiring AMERICAN WORKERS. I hope someone in the White House sees this post and says "hey, lets do that!" Rent out the biggest place you can find in DC and fill it up with our Captains of Industry and honor them for their new investments, new jobs, and renewed commitments to the United States, our economy, our workers and our citizens. Have numerous awards for workers and tradesmen in these companies who do such outstanding work, every single day, work that improves our lives in ways we don't adequately appreciate.

It would be a great event to inspire young people, thank older workers, and re-familiarize our country with the people who actually make it tick, whose businesses form the foundation, the economic base, that creates and supports everything else good that happens here economically and financially. You create or retain 1 manufacturing job, you create or retain 5 others in the US economy. It's called the multiplier effect of industrial development.

You think about our young people ... who do they see? Do they see engineers, manufacturers, innovators, producers, technical skills, tradesmen? No, they see whiny news correspondents, lying lawyers, goofy Hollywood people and swamp politicians ... all day and night. They need to see and witness more information about the great people who work in our industries, because they are the true heroes of a successful economy when they are investing and expanding in the United States.

The MSM Entertainment media has described itself as the "Fourth Estate" ... oh please, they aren't even in the Top 10.

There are 3 Major Estates in the United States. They are:

1. Citizens
2. Industry
3. Government

Everything else just feeds off one or more of the above.

Ben Stein Slams CNN, on CNN: You are ‘Hoping to Do’ to Trump ‘What You Did to Nixon’

by Ken Meyer | 11:21 pm, February 25th, 2017

Economist Ben Stein says he doesn’t blame President Trump for bagging the White House Correspondents Dinner, as it wouldn’t have been much more than another confrontation where he fends off the media.

On the heels of numerous media outlets cancelling their plans for “Nerd Prom” weekend, Trump announced Saturday that he would not show up for the annual dinner shared by the president and the press. Stein said he understood why Trump didn’t want to go be a “punching bag” for the media again. Conversely, Brianna Keilar then asked him how he felt about Trump slamming the press and calling them “the enemy” in recent days.

Unamused, Stein began to scold CNN (and the media at large), stating that many people view the press as an “unelected aristocracy” of “snobs” determined to negatively cover the president at every turn.

I wouldn’t say all the media are the enemy, but look, every day you pick up The New York Times. Everyday they’re slamming, slamming, slamming him. I’m a great fan of CNN. I watch it quite faithfully every day. CNN is slamming him, slamming him, slamming him. Every day they are looking for a scandal. They are turning the woods upside down looking for a scandal. They are hoping, I think, to do what they did to Nixon a long time ago…I don’t blame him for being furious at them.

Keilar referenced moments where CNN covered Trump in a positive light, though Stein kept slamming the network’s critical coverage of the president saying, “I don’t blame [Trump] for wanting to fire back at them.”

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ben-stein...-did-to-nixon/

Yes, that is exactly right, Ben, the MSM Media is an "unelected aristocracy" but without the achievements of most aristocracies. They aren't Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fords or Bells, and never will be, as much as they dream to be them, they never will be, because they're "all talk, no action." They chose the wrong profession.

That's why we need a White House New Jobs and Industry Dinner to acknowledge, recognize and honor our real Captains of Industry and American Workers in the United States, the ones upon whom we all depend for jobs, economic vitality, and financial security.

Again, because of the well-known multiplier effect of industrial development which is 6 to 1 in the United States, which means 6 jobs are created or retained in our economy for every 1 manufacturing job created or retained. This is huge and the massive loss of manufacturing in the United States over the last 40 years is why we're sitting here today with 94 million Americans of working age out of the work force and our government is $20 trillion in debt.

Until our "conversation" turns towards these important issues in our country from the completely worthless subjects of who speaks to a foreign ambassador which every American has the right to do any day, any time for any reason .... we're sinking, so and it's time to swim to the top and breathe fresh air.

LETS DO IT!! For the first time in decades, we have a President who understands this, he was educated on the American Economic System, which is the only system that works for our country, he's worked in it literally from the ground up, knows this system inside and out, and miraculously actually cares about the results for our American Workers, American Business and Industry and the United States.

This is our chance to fix our country. We must unite and do it. That means we have to tell the MSM self-anointed "fourth estate", either you're with US or you're against US. It's really just that simple.