White House correspondents’ dinner presses on, after covid delays and Trump

Saturday’s dinner is the first held post-Trump, who boycotted the event during his White House years. In 2018, comedian Michelle Wolf savaged administration officials — including press secretary Sarah Sanders, who was sitting feet away — and organizers invited a safer choice, historian Ron Chernow, to speak the following year.

That was the last WHCA dinner before the global pandemic shut it down for two years. This year’s follows the Gridiron Club dinner earlier this month, where the 600 guests were required to show proof of vaccination — but more than 10 percent tested positive for the virus within days. Most experienced mild symptoms; there were no reports of hospitalizations.

Despite the Gridiron cases, the WHCA never considered canceling. In addition to proof of vaccination, it is requiring all guests to provide proof of a same-day negative rapid test before admission into the ballroom. Many of the parties before and after the dinner are asking for proof of vaccination. Still, some White House officials and experts worry that coronavirus measures for the weekend are insufficient and that it could become a superspreader event.

All of this — Biden presence, Trump’s attacks and the waning pandemic — factored into the decision to proceed this year.

“So much of our dinner will be about the substance and the moment,” says Steven Portnoy, WHCA president and correspondent for CBS News. “And it’s meant to foster a better public appreciation for the essential role that journalists play in American life and society, in helping Americans govern and helping America govern itself.”

The organization brought in Bob Bain, an awards show producer working pro bono, and will present its first lifetime achievement award to 1950s journalists Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne, the first two African American women in the White House press corps — and have named it the Dunnigan-Payne Prize. The evening will also pay tribute to journalists who have died in Ukraine, and to acknowledge threats that reporters face all over the world.

There was a time, of course, when this was a little-known evening. The reporters held their first dinner in 1921, and President Calvin Coolidge joined the party in 1924 — a small affair of about 50 people. The evening was a chance for the press and the politicians they cover to spend a few hours informally getting to know one…