The organization said it also invited Vice President Harris, but “her confirmation is pending.”
Karen Attiah, the 2019 NABJ journalist of the year, announced Tuesday that she would step down as convention co-chair.
“While my decision was influenced by a variety of factors, I was not involved or consulted with in any way with the decision to platform Trump in such a format,” she wrote on social media. (Attiah is a Washington Post columnist who works for the Opinions division of The Post, which operates separately from its news coverage.)
Other journalists raised objections as well. TheGrio’s April Ryan, who clashed repeatedly with the then-president during her time as a White House correspondent, wrote that the invitation was “a slap in the face to the Black women journalists” who were verbally attacked by Trump.
NABJ is the most prominent association representing Black journalists; the nonprofit says it has more than 4,000 members.
Some criticized what they portrayed as NABJ’s “normalizing” of Trump by hosting him or the fact that the group did not make the announcement earlier. The choice of Faulkner, who has previously conducted interviews with Trump for Fox News that critics saw as soft and less than challenging, also drew complaints.
The Trump campaign used the invitation to boast about its purported support among Black voters. Recent national polls found between 15 and 19 percent of Black voters supported Trump against Harris.
Others, though, defended the event as part of the group’s mission in journalism.
“NABJ didn’t platform Trump. The voters in the Republican primary did,” Symone Sanders-Townsend, an MSNBC host who is a former Harris spokeswoman, wrote on social media.
“Just like anyone else who is running for President, he should sit for serious interviews and answer real questions.”
Representatives for NABJ and Harris did not immediately respond to The Post’s inquiries.
NABJ invites major-party presidential candidates during every election year, President Ken Lemon said in a video shared by NABJ Monitor. He said conversations began with both party’s then-presumptive candidates more than a month ago.
Lemon said the Trump invitation did not amount to an endorsement and called it a “great opportunity for us to vet the candidate right here on our ground.” He added that they expect panelists to fact-check Trump in real time, noting that the convention theme is “Winds of Change: Journalism Over Disinformation.”
“It is our jobs as journalists to have those uncomfortable conversations so that the people who count on us to inform them get the information from the source,” he said. “… It is our job also to offer that opportunity for those candidates to be here, and not doing that would not be the right thing.”
Lemon also said that he trusted the chosen journalists to hold Trump accountable. (Faulkner has previously been praised for a 2020 interview with Trump during the height of racial justice protests).
According to NABJ, former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have previously attended NABJ conventions.
At the 2017 convention, some prominent journalists bowed out of a panel discussion about police violence in part because then-Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman was invited to attend. The actual panel transformed into a shouting match, and Manigault Newman walked off the stage after the moderator said the event had “reached the point of diminished returns.”
