The White House Correspondents’ Association is still deciding whether to bring back its annual dinner after a gunman opened fire in the Washington Hilton lobby in an attack prosecutors said was meant to kill President Donald Trump, and the event has not been rescheduled more than three weeks after it was thrown into chaos.
WHCA president Weijia Jiang of CBS News said last week that the association “continues to weigh options for rescheduling the event,” speaking from China where she was covering Trump at the time of the attack that night. In her remarks afterward, Jiang had said, “We will do this again,” positioning the event as something the association intended to attempt to repeat.
Trump, meanwhile, said on social media that the dinner would be rescheduled within 30 days, a timeline that would point to later this month. Organizers and board members, however, were not treating a return as straightforward: a person familiar with the planning said board members were scoping out smaller venues that could accommodate safety and financial constraints, and that a return to the Washington Hilton or a full-scale dinner was not foreseen.
The debate has moved beyond the logistics of rescheduling, according to the reporting, into a broader question that some critics say goes to the credibility of the event itself—whether the WHCA should try to hold the dinner again so soon after the attack. Those critics also point to long-running discomfort among some journalists about media figures gathering socially with officials they cover.
Kelly McBride, an ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, argued that the dinner is a “bad look.” She said last week that it “undermines the public faith in how the press does its work” and “it makes it looks like we are pals with the people we cover,” even though some defenders have said the event is a fundraiser for journalism scholarships and also a celebration of the First Amendment.
McBride also described the attack as “deeply unfortunate” and said the challenge now is managing optics alongside security concerns. She said any event plan would have to keep the Secret Service satisfied, adding that she did not know how to accomplish that unless it is done in a government facility, and that such a location would risk the appearance of compromising the WHCA—while also questioning how redo the dinner could be accomplished this year “in a way that would accomplish everything they need.”
Security experts who have analyzed the Secret Service response disagreed that the dinner posed serious security issues. Jeff James, a retired Secret Service officer who now runs a security company, said, “Can it be done safely? I would argue that it was done safely the first time,” and he said the gunman never even reached the same floor as the president, describing the attacker as stopped within about 30 feet of reaching the middle perimeter.
James said the response was a “clear success for the Secret Service,” saying the gunman never came close to being within handgun range, and would not have been able to reach shotgun range. Anthony Cangelosi, a former Secret Service agent and lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, echoed that assessment and said the Secret Service was prepared for a “lone wolf” scenario like the one that occurred, which involved the suspect Cole Tomas Allen staying in the hotel at the time.
Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive officer of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said she attended the dinner to help keep the focus on press freedom. But she said she has been struck by how little emphasis there usually is on that subject during the multi-day event, and she described it as an “extremely expensive social event” taking place as journalists face ongoing threats, including layoffs and arrests while covering protests, according to her account.
Ginsberg said she was concerned that journalists are still “raising a toast to press freedom” without “having the courage to stand up in its defense when it actually gets threatened,” and she indicated she was not planning to attend again. Marcy McGinnis, a former CBS News executive, said she thought rescheduling would be troubling in terms of optics, but also said journalists can still do their work even if they socialize with a president they cover.
One scenario raised after the attack—holding the dinner in the White House ballroom—was described as not being on the table, with McBride saying the ballroom is something the WHCA should not use for credibility reasons, and with the reporting also tying the ballroom issue to a Justice Department effort connected to a lawsuit involving a $400 million project on the former East Wing site.
In a separate account, Jiang told the Columbia Journalism Review that she does not think the WHCA can do nothing. She said board members “unanimously agreed that we have to do something”—whether it is an event to execute its program, including awards and scholarships, or a dinner—and she said letting the current outcome stand as final was not an option, while Ginsberg said she would not attend another WHCA event after what she described as the need to highlight First Amendment and free-press values differently.