The White House Correspondents' Dinner has been controversial for decades. Media critics have argued since at least the 1990s that it sends the wrong signal to the public: that journalists and the officials they cover are all in it together, that the adversarial relationship is a performance, and that for one night a year everyone in Washington puts on a tuxedo and pretends they are on the same team. Those criticisms were valid before Trump. They are indefensible now.

Trump has called the press the enemy of the American people. He has sued The New York Times, the Associated Press, and other news organizations. He has attempted to dismantle Voice of America and strip taxpayer funding from public media. He has led a systematic campaign to discredit, intimidate, and silence journalists who cover him critically. He said before the April 25 dinner that he was ready to rip the press in his planned speech. He called this a speech of love.

Why is the American press corps sharing a meal with a president who has declared them enemies? Why are journalists in black tie schmoozing with administration officials they are supposed to be holding accountable? Journalism professor Kathy Kiely put it plainly: the norms that once made the dinner defensible are broken beyond recognition. Pretending they are not broken only confuses the public journalists are supposed to serve.

The New York Times stopped buying tables in 2007. It was right then. Every major news organization should follow its lead now. The dinner does not advance press freedom. It advances the appearance that press freedom is a performance journalists set aside when the Chateaubriand arrives. The shooting on April 25 did not make the dinner indefensible. It was already indefensible. It simply made the indefensibility impossible to ignore.

Sign this petition to call on the White House Correspondents' Association to cancel rather than reschedule the annual dinner, urge all major news organizations to follow the New York Times in declining to purchase tables or send guests as attendees, and demand that the WHCA redirect its press freedom advocacy work away from a celebrity dinner and toward the concrete legal and institutional battles that actually protect journalists from an administration that has declared them enemies.