For 17 years, HuffPost has attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the televised annual gathering of political journalists in Washington, D.C. This year, we cannot stomach it. We’re skipping.
The dinner has always had its critics. When the sitting U.S. president attended — the norm until Trump took office in 2017 — journalists were celebrating at a black-tie gala with the very people they were supposed to hold accountable.
This uneasy arrangement infamously veered into appalling spectacle in 2004, when President George W. Bush joked about his failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as some in attendance laughed. The mainstream media had disastrously failed to scrutinize the case for a needless war that, by one estimate, resulted in the deaths of more than 650,000 people. And there they were, laughing about it in tuxedos.
Still, HuffPost attended the event for a simple reason: At its core, the dinner aims to honor journalism and the value of a free press.
But this year, we must draw a line. President Donald Trump will attend the dinner and address the room.
