Archives for July 2026

It was one of the largest gatherings of media in Washington as the British Ambassador Christian Turner and Lady Claire Turner, Spotify’s Chief Public Affairs Officer Dustee Jenkins, and White House Correspondents Insider founder Tammy Haddad hosted a reception in honor of Weijia Jiang, 2025-2026 president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, at the Ambassador’s residence on Thursday night.  

CBS executives, including News president and executive editor Tom Cibrowski and new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton, joined the Washington team including Margaret Brennan, Robert Costa, Nancy Cordes, Sara Cook, Fin Gomez and Isabelle Pellegrino. 

Ambassador Turner told the crowd of over 300 administration, media and business leaders, “Both our democracies survive and thrive on accountability. A free press represented by so many of you here tonight. And that’s the heart of our free societies.”

Dustee Jenkins, Spotify, added,  “It is wonderful to be surrounded by so many journalists and policymakers and staffers and leaders, and that’s really what we’re all here for. That’s what this is really about.”

Jenkins presented Jiang with a Maggie O’Neill White House print signed, “For Her Courage, Composure, and professionalism in leading the White House Correspondents Association 2025-2026.” I am deeply honored by this recognition, but I want to be clear that it belongs to all of us. I have heard a lot about grace and composure and bravery, but any of that I showed on April 25th, I borrowed from everybody else in that room. And that includes so many of you. You put your personal fears aside to do our jobs, and I still find it hard to look at the videos sometimes to see us in our tuxes, in our gowns, in the briefing room, because there’s a cognitive dissonance. But also, what else would we expect to see? There’s nothing that would stand in the way of us making sure we were asking questions and informing the public at such a critical time.”

Tammy Haddad, veteran TV executive and founder of White House Correspondents Insider, wrapped up the program with a reminder of the important role journalists play in democracy. “A healthy democracy depends on an independent, vigorous press and the relationship between the president and all the reporters. This dinner tomorrow night is a return to those roots. A gathering centered on the enduring importance of that relationship and all the institutions that support it.”

The evening went late with a surprise set by Grammy Award-winning DJ Jazzy Jeff courtesy of Spotify. 

The official White House Correspondents Association dinner, or as the Ambassador called it “Season 2” of the dinner, takes place at the Waldorf Hotel on Friday night.  The ballroom, which was designed by President Trump when he owned the hotel, seats 600, so it will be primarily news organizations with their teams. Trump Cabinet Secretaries and White House officials are expected to attend. 

SPOTTED: Rep. Nicole Malliotakas (R-NY), Sean Cairncross, Kellyanne Conway, Patrick Witt, Chris Klomp, Alex Flemister, James Van Den Berg, Mike Caswell, Senay Bulbul, Rima al Sabah, H.E. Nicole Bintner-Bakshian.

CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, Nancy Cordes, Jonathan Karl, Margaret Brennan, Jacqui Heinrich, Andrea Mitchell, Wolf Blitzer, Nick Bilton, Jennifer Griffin, Shawn McCreesh, Josh Dawsey, Matea Gold, Tyler Pager, Sumi Somaskanda, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Sally Quinn, Caitriona Perry, Michael Beschloss, Adrienne Arsht, Susan Blumenthal, Kinsey Fabrizio, Katie Pavlich, Dmitri Alperovitch, Maureen Hinman, Stephanie Cutter, Susan Fox, Susannah Quinn, Meridith McGraw, Liz Bourgeois, Alexandra Veitch, Katelyn Bledsoe, Christian Garrett, Emily Skor, Jasmine Wright, Sara Fischer, Francesca Chambers, Jeff Mason, April Boyd, Steve Holland, Jeanne Moran, Dominique Yelinski, Marisa Schultz, Olivia Igbokwe, Courtney Rozen, Mario Parker, Colin Moneymaker, Cat Zakrzewski, T.W. Arrighi and Doug Heye.

The 33rd White House Correspondents’ Garden Brunch brought together guests from government, media, tech, business, and entertainment in honor of the press, public servants, and military families. The annual gathering was co-hosted by Tammy Haddad, Kevin Sheekey, David Urban, Mark and Sally Ein, Jon Banner, and Franco Nuschese. A few of the names spotted in the crowd at the historic Beall-Washington House include: Dr. Mehmet Oz, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, actors Michael Chiklis and Iain Armitage, Oz the Mentalist, UN Ambassador Mike Waltz, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and NobleReach CEO Arun Gupta who received the Mission Generation Award.

Video highlights of this year’s Garden Brunch can be found HERE!

The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner made headlines this year after gunshots were fired outside the Washington Hilton ballroom. It was a dramatic end to what had been an otherwise sunny Saturday in April. The dinner was rescheduled for Friday, July 24, and the venue moved to the Waldorf Astoria on Pennsylvania Avenue. The event will conclude the term of Weijia Jiang, White House Correspondents’ Association president and CBS News senior White House correspondent.

Jiang is being honored for her leadership and grace under pressure in the aftermath of the shooting incident with a reception at the home of the British Ambassador Thursday evening. The event is hosted by the British Ambassador to the US Sir Christian Turner and Lady Turner, and sponsored by Spotify and WHC Insider.

You can support the WHCA mission of a free press, excellence in journalism, and journalism education at this link.

The Annual White House Correspondents’ Garden Brunch and White House Correspondents Insider (WHC Insider) are not affiliated with, or approved by, the White House Correspondents’ Association, which is a registered trademark of the WHCA.

ASPEN, COLORADO – At the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, three of the sharpest minds in energy, economics, and technology policy were interviewed by Tammy Haddad for a special edition of the Washington AI Network Podcast to tackle a question increasingly on the minds of policymakers, executives, and voters alike for the annual gathering of business leaders, politicos, academics and media.

Moderator Tammy Haddad, founder of the Washington AI Network, opened the session, recorded June 27 by framing the stakes plainly: “Is there a road to broadly shared prosperity with AI?” Lael Brainard, former director of the National Economic Council and former Federal Reserve vice chair; Chris Womack, chairman, president, and CEO of Southern Company; and Benedict Macon-Cooney, Chief Innovation Officer at the Tony Blair Institute – offered three distinct vantage points, but converged on a shared unease: the economic gains from AI are real, but so far concentrated.

Brainard was the most direct. Pointing to what she called the “20/90 rule,” she noted, “Top 20% of American households have 90% of stock market wealth.” Brainard warned that the economy’s current AI-driven strength masks real fragility. “Our economy right now is a little bit fragile,” she said, noting that AI-related investment last year roughly matched the entire normal annual level of U.S. business fixed investment. Left unaddressed, she argued, the dynamic risks repeating the mistakes of the Gilded Age and the China trade shock. “I don’t think AI on its own is going to reduce inequality,” Brainard said. “I think you need institutions and social agreements that condition how AI affects distribution opportunities.”

Womack, whose Southern Company built roughly 50 gigawatts of power last year and plans to build more than 80 additional gigawatts in the coming years, pushed back on the narrative that data centers are squeezing household ratepayers, arguing hyperscale customers are effectively subsidizing everyone else’s bills. Womack was equally emphatic that the technology’s benefits can’t stop at Silicon Valley’s door. “We’ve got to make sure AI benefits all parts of our economy, all parts of our society, and not just the top,” he said, pointing to a planned data center in rural South Alabama as a case study in how AI-driven investment could revive communities left behind by decades-earlier manufacturing losses. “The opportunity I see with the tax investments, with the revenue coming from that data center, can change the life and the economic vitality of that community and all those homeowners.”

Macon-Cooney brought a global lens, arguing most nations will never be able to build frontier AI infrastructure themselves and need to instead focus on adoption and comparative advantage – comparing the choice to buy aircraft from Boeing or Airbus rather than building an aircraft carrier from scratch. On education, he pointed to a pilot AI tutoring program that delivered two years of academic progress in just two months as evidence that the technology’s benefits can reach beyond markets and into everyday life. “An AI tutor for every child,” he touted, “would be the most democratizing and powerful way to transform your education system.”

What emerged from Aspen was less a roadmap than a reckoning. The panelists agreed that the AI boom is real, that its infrastructure demands are staggering, and that its benefits – so far – are flowing disproportionately upward. But they also agreed that none of this is predetermined. Brainard’s warning about the Gilded Age, Womack’s data center empowering rural South Alabama, Macon-Cooney’s AI tutor delivering two years of learning in two months – each pointed to the same underlying truth: the technology is not the policy. AI will not distribute its own gains. That work falls to institutions, governments, and companies to make deliberate choices about who gets to participate in the boom and who gets left behind. In Aspen, at least, the conversation is happening. The question now is whether Washington will catch up before the window closes.

Catch the full episode available now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Three months after gunfire shattered one of Washington’s most storied traditions, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is coming back.

The rescheduled dinner will take place on Friday, July 24, at the Waldorf Astoria on Pennsylvania Avenue – a venue with its own complicated Washington history as the former Trump International Hotel – with President Trump expected to attend. White House Correspondents’ Association president and CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang announced in a letter to members, framing the decision as much a statement of principle as a scheduling matter.

“This dinner will not only be an opportunity to carry out our program,” Jiang wrote. “It will be a statement that violence has no place in American life and a free press will not be intimidated into silence. As you have all demonstrated, courage and community can and should rise above.”

The original dinner, held April 25 at the Washington Hilton, drew more than 2,500 guests. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among those in attendance. It was the first WHCA dinner Trump had attended as president; he skipped both terms of his first presidency and the 2025 event.

Just before 9 p.m., as mentalist Oz Pearlman performed a trick on stage beside Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, chaos broke out. Suspect Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old from Torrance, California, who had been staying as a guest at the hotel, rushed the security checkpoint outside the ballroom armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .38 semiautomatic pistol, and multiple knives. One Secret Service officer was struck in his bullet-resistant vest and hospitalized; he later recovered. Allen was arrested outside the ballroom.

Jiang was on stage beside the president when it happened. “It all happened so fast,” she recalled on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “When I heard something in the audience, I thought it was a protester – something we’re very used to. But then, when I saw SWAT team members come to the head table and say, ‘Down, down, down,’ we were crawling off the stage.”

After the Secret Service swept the principals to safety, Jiang returned to the podium to address the still-assembled crowd, directing guests to leave under law enforcement protocol. Trump, she said, refused to simply disappear into the night. “He really wanted to talk it through,” she said of a private conversation with the president backstage. “He told me that we were not going to be deterred. He refused to stand down, and that’s why he stayed.” Trump went on to deliver a late-night briefing from the White House press briefing room, where he called on Jiang for the first question.

At that briefing, Trump reflected on the strange bond the evening had forged. “This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press,” he said, “and in a certain way, it did, because of the fact that they just unified.”

Allen was charged with attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, use of a firearm during a crime of violence, transporting a firearm across state lines, and assaulting a federal officer. He pleaded not guilty on May 11. A manifesto attributed to him described his grievances against the Trump administration; he reportedly referred to himself as the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”

Jiang was unambiguous that rescheduling was a deliberate act, not a foregone conclusion. “Rescheduling was not automatic,” she wrote to WHCA members. “It was a choice that the WHCA board made after thoughtful consideration and input from our members. I want to thank board members for the time and care they brought to this decision, particularly on the security front.”

The July 24th event will look different from the traditional dinner. It will be more intimate in scale, with significantly enhanced security measures and new access procedures that Jiang said will be communicated directly to attendees. The WHCA has also fundraised to ensure members who paid for the April event will not have to pay again, and the organization is providing travel support to scholarship and journalism award winners so they can be recognized at the makeup dinner.

Trump announced his own attendance on Truth Social, calling the rescheduling “a sign of Strength and Fortitude” and accepting Jiang’s personal invitation to speak. He also revealed the venue — at the Waldorf Astoria, formerly the Trump International Hotel in the landmark Old Post Office building — before the WHCA had made a public announcement. “I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people,” Trump wrote, “but we will soon find out. In any event, it will be a ‘HOT’ ticket!”

The evening has placed Jiang, who has covered the White House for CBS since 2018, at the center of one of the more remarkable stories of a remarkable year. She had spent eight months planning the April dinner, and by her own account, hoped it might restore a measure of normalcy between the press and an administration with which many journalists have had an openly adversarial relationship. When she wrote to members about the rescheduled dinner, Jiang tied the decision explicitly to the broader stakes of the moment. “We will not allow an act of violence to have the last word,” she wrote, “especially during a year when we are reflecting on the 250th anniversary of America and everything we stand for.”

The dinner is set for Friday, July 24.