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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

As the Trump administration wages war on the press, news outlets hosting White House Correspondents’ Dinner events are dodging questions about who’s on their guest lists.

Natalie Korach
Natalie Korach

Apr 9, 2026

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

As the Trump administration wages war on the press, news outlets hosting White House Correspondents’ Dinner events are dodging questions about who’s on their guest lists.

Natalie Korach
Natalie Korach

Apr 9, 2026

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

When Donald Trump revealed last month that he would attend this year's White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time as president, the announcement prompted immediate blowback. After years of vilifying the press, the decision by the White House Correspondents’ Association to welcome Trump as a guest of honor struck many as an extraordinary act of appeasement.

Yet little attention has been paid to the nation’s biggest news organizations who play host to the weekend’s marquee gatherings. But as invitations for the weekend’s festivities started to circulate this week, it raised the question of whether newsrooms plan to welcome members of an administration that has spent more than a year publicly waging war against them.

Status reached out to the handful of major outlets hosting WHCD-adjacent events to ask whether they planned to invite members of the administration to sip cocktails and snack on hors d’oeuvres at their respective events. Will officials like Karoline Leavitt and Stephen Miller—who regularly launch vicious assaults on the press—be welcomed with open arms at gatherings ostensibly aimed at celebrating the First Amendment and standing up to those who would chip away at it?

Representatives for ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW, NBC News, and POLITICO…

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Oliver Darcy

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