The White House Correspondents' Dinner Is Next Saturday. The Empty Seats Will Tell You Which Journalists Still Have A Spine.

Next Saturday night, reporters from every major newsroom in the country will put on their tuxedos, pick up their drink tickets, and sit in a ballroom at the Washington Hilton while the sitting president of the United States looks out over a sea of the people he has spent fifteen months degrading.

Degrading from the podium. Degrading in his social media posts. Degrading in press releases. Degrading in lawsuits. After four decades in courtrooms and more than seventy trials, I have seen plenty of people make bad calls. Walking into this dinner belongs on the list.

I need to be straight with you about something.

The White House Correspondents’ Association is selling April 25th as a celebration of the First Amendment. It is not. Not this year. This year it is a photo op for a president who has sued ABC, CBS, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, banned the Associated Press from parts of the press pool, pulled credentials from Pentagon reporters, and called working journalists enemies of the people from behind the seal of the United States government.

Let me tell you what I noticed.

Plenty of people defend the dinner by pointing to the scholarships it funds. The money goes to good causes. Journalism students benefit. I hear the argument. I do not buy it.

Add up what this administration has spent on ICE, Israel, Argentina, and the Iran war, and what you come up with dwarfs whatever check the dinner cuts for student scholarships. You want to support young journalists. Good. There are a hundred ways to do it without handing Donald Trump a standing ovation.

Here Is What Nobody Is Telling You

The press has been taking punches every single day since January 20, 2025. Insults from the lectern. Ridicule in front of foreign leaders. Outright lies repeated until they bruise. Personal attacks on reporters by name. Threats against broadcast licenses. Regulatory investigations opened by the FCC. Physical restrictions on press access. After all of it, the response from the profession is to rent tuxedos and show up for dinner.

Read the room.

This president has spent fifteen months splitting the press into two camps. The ones who play along get access. The ones who do their jobs get punished. He has turned the White House briefing into a loyalty test. He has turned the lectern into a bully pulpit in the most corrosive sense of the phrase. He has divided reporters from each other, picked them off one by one, and told them to be grateful for scraps.

Here is what got me. More than 250 journalists and press organizations, including Dan Rather at 94 and Sam Donaldson at 92, had to sign an open letter this week begging the White House Correspondents’ Association to speak forcefully from the podium in defense of a free press. Let the weight of that sink in. Two men who covered every president from Kennedy through George W. Bush had to publicly ask the current generation of reporters to grow a spine.

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This Is Happening Right Now

Your First Amendment is not a theory. It is the reason you know anything about what your government is doing to your tax dollars, your borders, your kids, and your country. Strip the press out of the equation and you get propaganda. You get whatever the man at the microphone wants you to believe on any given day. You get a country where the only sanctioned version of the truth is the one approved from the Oval Office.

You have a stake in this. So do I. So do our kids. So do our grandkids.

The Reframe

Showing up to this dinner is not neutral. It is not tradition. It is not rising above the noise. Showing up says, we will sit here and smile while you degrade our profession, and then pose for photos with you on our way out. Showing up says, the scholarship check is worth the dignity of the press corps. Showing up says, you hit us in the mouth for a year, and we will still raise a glass to you on Saturday night.

No other profession in America treats abuse this way. A trial lawyer does not take a hostile judge to brunch after being berated in open court. A surgeon does not socialize with someone who goes on television and tells the public her patients were better off dead. The press is the one profession still willing to break bread with the person most responsible for poisoning the well against it.

Grow A Spine

To the reporters and editors reading this, hear me out. You do not owe this dinner your attendance. You owe your readers the truth. You owe your colleagues at the Associated Press your solidarity after they lost their spot in the pool. You owe the Pentagon reporters whose credentials got pulled. You owe the families of journalists who have endured harassment, doxxing, and threats for doing their jobs.

Support each other. Back each other up. Refuse to normalize any of this.

Picture the moment.

The lights go up. The cameras pan the ballroom. Half the seats are empty. The president walks in expecting applause and is met with the sound of his own footsteps. No press corps to mock. No reporters to insult. No audience to bully. Every outlet sending the same signal in unison. We are not props for your theater.

That image alone sends more shockwaves through this administration than a thousand tough questions at a briefing.

The Call

I will be paying attention to next Saturday night. I am paying attention to who walks in. I am paying attention to who stays home. I will keep championing the work of the reporters who choose their profession over the spectacle. I will stop paying attention to the ones who choose the spectacle.

The dinner does not define journalism. You do.

Stay home. Hold the line. Monday morning, get back to work.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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