By Associated Press - Sunday, April 28, 2019

Historian Ron Chernow says presidents have always had differences with the press, but “they don’t need to be steeped in venom.”

Chernow was the featured speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night. The author of “Alexander Hamilton” represented a major change for the dinner, which in recent years has hired comedians as speakers.

President Donald Trump has refused to attend during his time in office and has called the media “enemies of the people.”



Chernow says “relations between presidents and the press are inevitably tough, almost always adversarial.”

In fact, he says, President George Washington also felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that into a vendetta.

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