If President Donald Trump attends this month’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, he’ll be onstage as journalists from a network he routinely calls “fake news” are honored for reporting on intelligence findings that were partly based on a dossier he also calls “fake.”

CNN won the WHCA’s Merriman Smith Award in the broadcast category for its January 2017 report on how the intelligence community believed Russia had compromising information on Trump; that report was followed by BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the entire “dossier” of opposition research on Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, which has become a particular focus of the president’s wrath.


The announcement on Monday of CNN’s victory — along with a trove of other awards to various outlets for largely critical coverage of Trump and his administration — appeared to complicate the WHCA’s invitation to Trump to attend this year’s dinner, a symbolically important gesture of mutual respect.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to a question as to whether Trump has yet made up his mind.

The correspondents’ organization hasn’t gotten any word yet either, according to Margaret Talev, a Bloomberg correspondent and the organization’s president.

“We don’t have anything to report yet on whether the president plans to attend,” she said.

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Earlier on Monday, in announcing the awards, Talev said in a statement that the correspondents’ association “congratulates these award winners, and we're proud to honor them at our annual dinner as we celebrate the First Amendment and the crucial role of journalism in informing and protecting the public.”

Trump skipped last year's dinner following numerous battles with various news organizations. He even counter-programmed the 2017 event by holding a rally in which he mocked the “Hollywood actors and Washington media” who were “consoling each other" in a hotel ballroom. The crowd in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ate it up.

But Trump attended last month’s Gridiron Dinner, a smaller journalist gala that doesn’t permit photo or video coverage, and hasn't yet ruled out going to the April 29 dinner.

The potential for awkwardness with the press-bashing president in a room full of journalists, carried live on TV, only increased Monday as the correspondents’ association announced several award winners whose work has particularly infuriated him.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who the president claimed in March was a “Hillary flunky” who "knows nothing about me," won the Aldo Beckman Award for — in the words of the judges — showing “her deep understanding of what makes President Trump tick.”

POLITICO’s Josh Dawsey won the Merriman Smith Award for print media for his reporting on the resignation of White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Dawsey has since joined The Washington Post, a news organization the president labeled “fake” on Saturday. Trump also has been recently attacking Amazon, the company led by Post owner Jeff Bezos.

But perhaps no news organization has felt Trump’s wrath like CNN, which is taking home the Merriman Smith Award for broadcast media. CNN's Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein are being honored for their January 2017 report on how the intelligence community had briefed President Barack Obama and then-President elect Trump that Russia claimed to have compromising information the incoming president.

BuzzFeed followed up on the CNN report by publishing the dossier, compiled by an opposition-research company funded in part by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. BuzzFeed’s decision, which was criticized even among some other media organizations, led to a particularly raucous news conference the following day. Trump refused to answer a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta, whom he instead dubbed “fake news.” He's gone on to repeatedly call the dossier — which included unverified claims about the president and his allies' ties to Russia — fraud and part of a larger "hoax."

The honorable mention for The Merriman Smith Award went to NBC’s Lester Holt for his May 2017 interview with Trump in which the president admitted to considering the Russia investigation when firing former FBI Director James Comey. Trump is still bothered by the Holt interview, telling the NBC Nightly News anchor at a private, January meeting with TV journalists that it was unfairly edited, as POLITICO reported.

The Edgar A. Poe Award went to a team from Reuters for its investigation of Taser-related deaths and litigation — the only non-Trump related prize. But an honorable mention was given to POLITICO’s Dan Diamond and Rachana Pradhan for their reporting on Tom Price's private jet travel, which led to the Health and Human Services Secretary’s resignation.

At past Correspondents' Dinners, the president is typically on stage to greet journalists as they get their awards. So this year, that would include Bernstein, the famed Watergate reporter and current CNN reporter and commentator. Bernstein has called Trump a “demagogic authoritarian president” and has accused him of “incessant, compulsive, continual lying.”

The dinner is usually a time when presidents of both parties and members of the media gather in a show of patriotism and common respect. The president congratulates the award-winning journalists and students who receive scholarships from the correspondents’ association; the reporters and editors raise a toast to the president.

In the past, the dinner has been criticized for creating a perception of coziness between journalists and members of an administration they’re expected to hold accountable. The New York Times decided more than a decade ago not to attend for those reasons. But Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the press and suggestions that journalists’ actions are anti-American raised a different set of issues last year.

News organizations didn't end up having to decide whether to attend in response to Trump's attacks because he announced in a February 2017 tweet that he would not be going. Without the president or the many big-name celebrities who attended in the past, the 2017 dinner ended up becoming a celebration of the Fourth Estate that included speeches by Bernstein and Bob Woodward on the importance of aggressive coverage of any administration.

“Journalists should not have a dog in the political fight except to find [the] best obtainable version of the truth,” Woodward said, adding later, “Whatever the climate, whether the media’s revered or reviled, we should and must persist, and I believe we will.”