White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that she will skip the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, saying the organization has long been an exclusive club that has kept out new and independent media.
Leavitt said she will skip the dinner, which is slated for April 26, during an appearance on Sean Spicer’s podcast. Spicer served as President Donald Trump’s press secretary during the Trump’s first six months in office in 2017.
“I will not be in attendance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and that’s breaking news for The Sean Spicer Show,” Leavitt said.
“This is a group of journalists who’ve been covering the White House for decades,” she explained.
WATCH — Trump Press Sec. Karoline Leavitt Announces Welcome of “New Media” to Press Briefings:
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.”
The White House press secretary said the Correspondents’ Association is 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.”
“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.
WATCH — “I Now Regret Giving a Question to the Associated Press”: Leavitt Destroys Reporter Lecturing Her:
Fox News reported:
Eugene Daniels, the president of WHCA’s board and a Politico correspondent, said the decision “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” but the White House championed the move as modernizing the press pool to expand past solely legacy media. The Trump administration said the three traditional wire services – the Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters – would no longer have a permanent spot in the pool and would instead rotate a single spot in the 13-member group.
The White House later barred the AP from the press pool for ignoring Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The ban was temporarily upheld in federal court, though U.S. District Court Judge Trevor N. McFadden warned that case law did not favor the White House and scheduled another hearing for March 20.
The president did not attend the Correspondents’ Association dinner during his first term in office.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
Jesus Christ is King
