Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr to Attend WHCD Amid Growing Outrage From Journalists at Attacks on Free Speech

Brandon Bell/Pool via AP

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr will attend the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, Oliver Darcy reported Monday evening, part of a controversial effort to honor President Donald Trump’s administration that he described in his Status newsletter as “akin to a fire department inviting arsonists to a gathering aimed at celebrating firefighting.”

The WHCD was already facing blowback from journalists over inviting Trump as an “honoree” and CBS News hosting Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller as guests at their table. More than 250 journalists signed an open letter urging any reporters who attend to “forcefully demonstrate opposition” to the Trump administration’s “systematic, sustained, and unprecedented attacks on the free press” that were a “profound contradiction” of the purpose of the dinner, to serve as “a celebration of the First Amendment and the journalists who uphold it.”

According to Darcy, “Trump’s lapdog” FCC chair Carr will also be in attendance, courtesy of an invite from CBS News’ parent company, Paramount.

“I am planning on attending,” Carr confirmed he would be at the dinner via text message after Status reached out for comment, but “not with CBS for it.”

Carr did not answer when Status asked him to confirm if he would be sitting at the Paramount table, or if he had received other invitations.

As Darcy’s report noted, rolling out the red carpet for Carr “to clink glasses in celebration of a free press is, at the very least, difficult to square.” Since taking the reins at the FCC, Carr has been an eager attack dog pursuing Trump’s critics in the media, going after seemingly every network except for Fox, threatening to yank station licenses, publicly pressuring local carriers to drop Jimmy Kimmel’s show, launched “enforcement proceedings” against The View, made demands for what the media should cover, and repeatedly claimed he has the right to review the content of what journalists report.

Paramount, which declined to comment about the Carr invite, needed the Trump administration’s approval for its merger with Skydance, and that was widely viewed as the instigator for its push for CBS News to settle a lawsuit Trump filed regarding a 60 Minutes interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris, despite numerous legal scholars viewing the president as having a weak case.

Now, Paramount has its eye on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, and will once again need the Trump administration to give a green light, making the company and its CEO, David Ellison, “desperate for the federal government’s blessing,” wrote Darcy. Ellison “is not-so-subtly using the WHCD festivities to grease the wheels even more,” he added, and will be hosting a separate event “in celebration of the First Amendment” this week “honoring the Trump White House,” with the president as a special guest.

It might be “standard practice” to invite the sitting president and members of the administration to the WHCD, Darcy wrote, before excoriating that “tradition” this year as “appalling” and ignoring how aggressive the Trump administration’s assaults on the First Amendment have been.

“Trump and his allies have made vilifying the press a central part of how they govern, trashing longstanding norms to kneecap journalists at every turn,” he wrote.

Trump “is an autocratic wannabe who has shredded norms in Washington, including those related to how the press operates,” he continued, “[R]egardless of tradition, why should the WHCA honor a president who demonizes journalism itself? It’s akin to a fire department inviting arsonists to a gathering aimed at celebrating firefighting.”

Read the report at Status.

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