President Donald Trump may be skipping the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year, but famous journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein will present journalism awards and speak at the event, the Washington Post reports.
In a typical year, the White House Correspondents’ Association brings in a celebrity entertainer to headline the dinner, and that announcement is usually made months in advance. But this year, no such announcement has been made.
The adversarial relationship between President Donald Trump and the press had many feeling ambivalent about the typically glitzy dinner since November. Many news organizations decided they would not attend and celebrities began calling for a boycott of the dinner. Trump said he would not attend, and the White House staff decided to skip the dinner along with him.
Now, the correspondents’ association seems to be billing the evening as a toned-down affair that will focus on the journalism the dinner was always supposed to highlight. Woodward and Bernstein won’t be filling in for the usual celebrity joke-teller, according to the Post, the paper where they broke the famous Watergate scandal that won them a Pulitzer Prize and helped bring down Richard Nixon.
“I hope not,” Woodward told the Post about filling in on the joke front. “I think having two old guys like Carl and me will be enough comedy.” Their remarks will focus on “the First Amendment and the importance of aggressive but fair reporting,” he added.
Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most.
