White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she is skipping the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner slated for April 26.
Leavitt made the announcement during a podcast appearance with Sean Spicer, who served as President Donald Trump’s White House press secretary for the first six months of 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.
Leavitt said the WHCA “has truly become a monetized monopoly over the White House and the coverage of the president of the United States in America.”
“This is a group of journalists who’ve been covering the White House for decades,” she said on the podcast published Friday. “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.”
Leavitt said the WHCA has been 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 added, revealing that the White House has received more than 15,000 applications for the new media seat in the press briefing room.
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In late February, the White House said it would decide which journalists would be a part of the 13-member pool covering Trump in limited spaces, such as the Oval Office or Air Force One, breaking from the century-old tradition of the WHCA independently selecting which news outlets go where the president does when the full press corp cannot be accommodated.
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.
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Trump did not attend the WHCA annual dinner during his first term. Last month, the association tapped comedian Amber Ruffin, a writer for the “Late Show with Seth Meyers,” to headline this year’s dinner. Ruffin told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “no one wants” Trump to show up, though the president “should” go to the event traditionally attended by the president and the first lady.