WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden, talking Saturday on the White House Correspondents’ Affiliation dinner, vowed to proceed to work to free People believed to be wrongly detained overseas.

In the course of the annual occasion, Biden talked about the plight of Wall Avenue Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, detained in Russia on March 29 and accused of espionage.

“Free press is a pillar, perhaps the pillar, of a free society — not the enemy,” Biden stated, countering the outlook of the final administration.

Gershkovich is one in all a variety of People held abroad on what United States officers see as false fees produced to rework the prisoners into what Biden described as “political pawns” and “human beings as bargaining chips.”

He additionally spoke of Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine jailed in Russia on an espionage conviction, a cost he denies, and Austin Tice, a former U.S. Marine held captive since 2012 in Syria, the place he went to work as a contract journalist.

“We’re retaining the religion for Austin,” the president stated. “We’re not giving up.”

Biden acknowledged a particular visitor on the occasion, Brittney Griner, the skilled basketball participant held in Russia for many of 2022 after which freed in December as a part of a prisoner swap with the U.S.

Within the case of Gershkovich, his employer and the Biden administration have denied that he was spying on behalf of america. And on April 10, the State Division designated Gershkovich as wrongfully detained.

“Tonight our message is that this,” Biden stated: “Journalism shouldn’t be a criminal offense.”

A senior White House official stated the president has an “unwavering dedication to deliver house wrongfully detained journalists and different People.”

This 12 months’s comedian performer was Roy Wooden Jr., a correspondent for “The Every day Present,” who spoke of his father’s personal work as a journalist and co-founder of radio’s Nationwide Black Community

Final 12 months was the primary time a sitting president attended this system since Barack Obama in 2016.

On the 2022 dinner, Biden spoke for slightly below quarter-hour, cracking jokes at himself and the media.

“I’m actually excited to be right here tonight with the one group of People with a decrease approval score than I’ve,” Biden quipped as he began his remarks.

Biden praised the significance of a free press in his remarks final 12 months.

“What’s clear — and I imply this from the underside of my coronary heart — that you just, the free press, matter greater than you ever did within the final century,” Biden stated final 12 months.

The history of the famed dinner stretches again to 1914, when the White House Correspondents’ Affiliation was established. The affiliation held its first dinner in 1921, sparking the annual custom. Nevertheless it wasn’t till 1924 that the president, then Calvin Coolidge, began attending.

Comedians usually host the occasion and crack jokes concerning the administration and the media.

One of many extra notable White House correspondents’ dinners was throughout Biden’s vice presidency in 2011, when Obama and comic Seth Meyers blasted Donald Trump, who was within the viewers.

“Donald Trump has been saying that he’ll run for president as a Republican,” Meyers stated as Trump seemed on, showing unamused. “Which is shocking, since I simply assumed he was operating as a joke.”

Trump skipped all the White House correspondents’ dinners throughout his time period.

After comic Michelle Wolf delivered a blistering 2018 dinner routine taking purpose on the Trump administration, Trump tweeted that “the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is DEAD as we all know it.”

The following 12 months, the group opted to have historian Ron Chernow ship a speech as a substitute of a comic.