Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson and Others Demand Press Call Trump Out to His Face at Glitzy Dinner in Scorching Letter

[riversedge]

2. 'This petition demands that the association speak frankly from the podium, in Trump's presence, rather than offering him

cginisty
@cginisty
·
2h
Translated from French
🔴 300 American journalists have just signed a petition demanding that their peers publicly condemn Trump from the podium, in his presence, at the correspondents' dinner.

This initiative and this document are historic.

The White House Correspondents' Association dinner has existed since 1914. For 112 years, it has celebrated the relationship between power and the press in a democracy. Presidents from all sides have attended. Reagan even participated from his hospital bed after the 1981 assassination attempt. It is one of the founding rituals of American democracy: the head of the executive and the journalists who scrutinize him, gathered in the same room, under the same roof, to celebrate press freedom together.

🗓️ On April 25, 2026, Donald Trump will be seated at the head table of this evening. And 300 journalists have just signed a letter to say that this is not normal, that it cannot be "business as usual," that standing up to applaud the man who attacks them daily would be a betrayal of what this dinner is meant to represent.

The petition sets out the following facts:

🟥 The Associated Press @AP was banned from presidential events and Air Force One for refusing to write "Gulf of America" in its editorial style guide.

🟥 @CNN
, @washingtonpost
, @nytimes
, @NBCNews
, @NPR
had their offices at the Pentagon removed.

🟥 Rules prohibiting journalists from publishing information not validated by the Department of Defense were imposed (before being overturned by a court for violating the First Amendment).

🟥 @CBS
and @ABC
received lawsuits so costly to defend that they preferred to settle, paying 16 and 15 million dollars respectively to the future Trump presidential library, under pressure from regulatory approval processes controlled by the administration.

🟥 Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel
) was suspended by ABC for a week after the @FCC
threatened the network with revocation of its broadcasting license.

🟥 The New York Times was accused of treason and labeled "the enemy of the people," rhetoric that press protection organizations identify as characteristic of authoritarian regimes.

🟥 The White House launched an official webpage titled "Hall of Shame" targeting journalists by name for reports deemed unfavorable.

🟥 Journalists were arrested while covering public events; Don Lemon (@Donlemonbsky
) and Georgia Fort (@ByGeorgiaFort
) are being sued.

🟥 The home of a Washington Post journalist was raided by the FBI, her phone and computers seized.

🟥 An Emmy Award-winning journalist was deported while covering a rally.

🟥 A Colombian journalist seeking asylum was arrested by ICE the day after a report on ICE raids.

🟥 1.1 billion dollars in funding already allocated to public broadcasting was revoked, putting 180 radio and television stations at risk of closure.

🟥 Voice of America (@VOANews), 83 years of history, a global symbol of American freedom of expression, listened to under all the authoritarian regimes on the planet, was dismantled.

🟥 From the first day of the second term, hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for press freedom abroad were suspended.

🟥 ... And the detail that says it all about the message sent: among the 1,500 people pardoned for the January 6, 2021 events, there were eight individuals convicted or charged with violence against journalists.

The United States has fallen to 57th place out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter
) index, their lowest ranking since the index was created in 2002.

This petition demands that the association speak frankly from the podium, in Trump's presence, rather than offering him "only" a festive evening.

Resistance, not passive complicity.

The signatories are not activists. They include Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson, Ann Curry, Andrea Koppel, the faces of American journalism from the last fifty years. People who have covered wars, presidents, constitutional crises. People who know, better than anyone, what a free press means, and what it means to lose it.

In The Puppet of the White House, I analyze how this administration understood that the press didn't need to be muzzled directly to be neutralized. It just needed to be financially ruined through lawsuits, threatened regulatorily by the FCC, to reward the compliant and punish the independent, to pardon those who struck journalists, to deport those who cover events, to create an ecosystem where self-censorship becomes the norm for survival.

The April 25 dinner will be the mirror of what the American press chooses to do in the face of this reality.

📖 The Puppet of the White House → https://amazon.fr/dp/B0GPCCMS68/


The text of the petition is here:

Link to tweet

?s=20