Comedian Amber Ruffin will no longer host the White House Correspondents Dinner, in what Variety magazine called “a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news organizations during President Donald Trump’s second term.”
But is it that, or a sign that the White House Correspondents Association, which sponsors the annual celebrity-studded event, is course-correcting to seem less hostile toward conservatives like some other media organizations are?
Ruffin, who appears on CNN news comedy show “Have I Got News for You,” had spoken with Jake Tapper in February about hosting the event, which Tapper described as “one of the toughest gigs in comedy.” She said that other comedians had advised her to be sure to make fun of everybody, not just “the people you disagree with — you have to spread it out evenly.” But she told Tapper, laughing, “I’m not going to do that.”
Instead she said she planned on “telling the truth about how I feel.”
“We all feel a little sad ... and I think it’s OK to say exactly what it is that’s making us feel this way, and when you do that, and people feel the same way as you, they think that it is fun and funny and it feels good to hear, and that’s kind of where I operate from.”
Tapper then noted although other presidents attended at least one of these dinners during their term of office, Donald Trump has never attended the White House Correspondents Dinner as president. (He was, however, in attendance when host Seth Myers and then-President Barack Obama mocked him at the event in 2011.)
He asked Ruffin if she wanted the president to be there this year.
“No!” she said. “No one wants that.” She went on to say, “He should. He’s missing out on one of the cool things about being the president of the United States. But I don’t know that anyone is looking forward to being in the same room with him.”
In a statement about the decision, White House Correspondents Association president Eugene Daniels said that the board had unanimously decided to disinvite Ruffin.
“At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” Daniel wrote in an email to association members.
On social media, some people responded to the news by saying free speech is being suppressed and calling for journalists not to attend the event; others suggested that Ruffin should be featured at another event, or a livestream, that occurs at the same time at the correspondents dinner.
Law professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley, however, wrote that he had planned to not attend the event because of Ruffin hosting it, and had encouraged others to do the same. “The WHCA has long shown a political bias in such comedians, but nothing quite as brazen as Ruffin,” Turley wrote.
The White House Correspondents Dinner has come to be one of the most talked-about events in media, one that has its own red-carpet walk because of the number of celebrities that attend.
In a 2024 essay for Deseret Magazine, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni described the 2018 event this way: “... journalists swanned into a ballroom as thick with self-regard as any Academy Awards ceremony. They hobnobbed with the Hollywood stars whom they’d invited — and in some cases competed over — to be guests at their tables. And they listened to the comedian Michelle Wolf do what she was hired to do: savage Trump and his aides in vicious and occasionally vulgar terms that predictably caused the media’s enemies to trumpet that we journalists are no more dignified than the president whose indecency we lament.”
Last year’s host, Colin Jost, took multiple swipes at both Trump and then-President Joe Biden, saying of Biden, “The last time I was in D.C., I left my cocaine at the White House. Luckily, the president was able to put it to good use for his State of the Union,” and of Trump, “Can we just acknowledge how refreshing it is to see a president of the United States at an event that doesn’t begin with a bailiff saying ‘all rise’?”