Correspondent Dinner at the White House: No more fun

She made at this year's evening gala rude jokes about the connection between the porn actress Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump and designated Trump's spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders in reference to the series "The Handmaid's Tale" as a brutal overseer. For comedian Michelle Wolff earned plenty of criticism. It is part of the tradition of the dinner in the White House to take the current policy apart. For the coming year, however, the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) has invited the author and presidential biographer Ron Chernow as a guest speaker.

"As we celebrate the importance of free and independent press for the good of the Republic, I am delighted to hear Ron speak," said WHCA Chairman Olivier Knox. He had already announced to the board in the summer that he would not want to be a comedian at the next correspondent dinner. Background should be the appearance of Wolf. Some celebrated the disrespectful words of the 33-year-olds as a great satire in April this year, others called them insulting. Trump himself had stayed away from the evening gala, as it had the year before.

AP

Ron Chernow

The historian and journalist Chernow will speak at the dinner on April 27, 2019 about American history and the first sentence of the American Constitution (First Amendment). This guarantees, among other things, the right to freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

"Freedom of the press is always a contemporary issue and it seems to me to be the perfect time to devote to this core value," said Chernow, who includes biographies of George Washington and John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the US has written.

Wolf tweets: "Cowards"

Already in the years before, the WHCA had focused on press freedom at the gala evening: in 2017, "Watergate affair" supporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein spoke, this year the Egyptian-American activist Aya Hijazi told her story. The comedian Wolf still described the announcement of the Journalists Association as cowardice, as she immediately tweeted:

The @whca are cowards. The media is complicit. And I could not prouder. https://t.co/OOIFGuZ731

The decision comes at a time when the American president's relationship with the free press is at a new low: after the UN's temporary suspension of accreditation from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House now announces formal rules for press conferences.

In the future, journalists may only ask one question if they are called. It remains the President or other representatives of the White House reserved whether the respective journalist may ask follow-up questions. Violations could be punished with suspension or withdrawal of accreditation. After all: The WHCA reacted with incomprehension and made it clear that one did not feel bound by such restrictions.