Hundreds Rally Outside White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Protest of Gaza Situation
On a chilly Saturday evening in Washington, DC, hundreds of individuals gathered to protest the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, demonstrating their solidarity with journalists in Gaza.
The recent initiative, which was rolled out at the beginning of this month, has not received a significant amount of attention from journalists based in the US. It is designed to target not only the US government but also the Washington media establishment, which has faced criticism for being excessively friendly with the US administration for an extended period.
“The Biden administration’s ongoing support for Israel’s genocidal policies implicates it directly in the relentless targeting and massacring of journalists in Gaza, including hundreds of our colleagues and their families,” reads a letter from Palestinian journalists imploring US-based journalists to boycott the event.
“For journalists to fraternize at an event with President Biden and Vice President Harris would be to normalize, sanitize, and whitewash the administration’s role in genocide,” it continues.
Nasser Abu Baker, president of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, said that journalists attending the dinner had to think about their actions in light of Israel’s war on Gaza.
“The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, intended to celebrate journalism and the First Amendment, cannot be divorced from the broader context of the administration’s involvement in the ongoing killing of and threat against Palestinian journalists,” he said.
As the guests arrived at the Hilton Hotel, they awkwardly walked past police barricades and protesters urging them to reconsider attending the event.
Some expressed sympathy with the protesters as they headed to the hotel, while most avoided eye contact. It is unclear if any attendees left the event due to the demonstration, many were coming and going throughout the evening.
Mehdi Hasan, who has previously attended the dinner and is one of the few journalists to publicly boycott the event, expressed his support on X, formerly Twitter, writing, “I decided not to attend today’s dinner (which, to be clear, is hosted by DC journalists not the White House) in solidarity with under-fire Palestinian journalists in Gaza who have called for a boycott.”
The crowd of protesters in front of the event on Saturday, estimated at around 400, beat drums, chanted and stayed late into the evening as the last guests left. On the other side of the street, an installation displayed press vests with the names of Palestinian journalists who had lost their lives in the war, along with a news camera and a Palestinian flag. As night fell, small candles were lit in front of the vests.
Filming them from a cafe perched above the hotel entrance were dozens of reporters, a deviation from previous years when jokes at the dinner accounted for most of the event’s media coverage. This year, the protesters did their best to ensure that the spotlight was on journalists in Gaza.
