White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Saturday that she will skip the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) dinner on April 26, calling it an "exclusive club."
“I will not be in attendance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and that’s breaking news for The Sean Spicer Show,” Leavitt said. Spicer was the White House press secretary at the beginning of President Donald Trump's first term.
She called the association an “exclusive group of journalists who cover this White House, they have not really welcomed other people, new media, independent journalists with open arms, and so we thought it was time to expand the coverage and determine who gets to be part of that 13-person press pool, who gets to ask the president of the United States questions in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One.”
“This is a group of journalists who’ve been covering the White House for decades,” she explained.
Leavitt continued, “They started this organization because the presidents at the time were not doing enough press conferences. I don’t think we have that problem anymore under this president, so the priorities of the media have shifted, especially with this new digital age.”
She explained more about the changes Trump has made to allow smaller outlets expanded access to information about his actions and activities.
“Since we have started this new process of determining the daily rotation, so many new voices and outlets who have never been part of this small and privileged group of journalists have been able to access those very unique and privileged spaces and cover this presidency and that’s very important,” Leavitt remarked.
The president of WHCA's board, Eugene Daniels has claimed that the new rotation “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States."
The rotation forced Reuters, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg to take turns attending press briefings.
After the Associated Press refused to follow a Trump executive order to call the body of water directly south of the United States the Gulf of America, Trump banned the outlet from the briefing room.
The ban has been upheld so far, but a district court judge has expressed doubt that it would ultimately survive.
It may be a new and different thing for the White House Press Secretary to skip the WHCA dinner, but Trump did not attend it during his first term.
Typically, a comedian roasts the president and other attendees at the dinner, and because most comedians are liberal, the roasts of Republican presidents have been unnecessarily brutal.
It's no surprise that Trump doesn't feel like nasty roasting is worth his time, or that of his staff.
