The White House Correspondents’ Association has laid out new seating assignments for reporters who attend daily briefings and news conferences, reports The Washington Post.
It’s the first time since 2017 that the journalists’ organization, which controls the 49 press seats in the cramped James S. Brady Briefing Room, has rejiggered who sits where, or doesn’t sit anywhere at all.
On one hand, the reorganization is merely a quadrennial exercise in bureaucratic reshuffling, the grown-up equivalent of assigning new desks in a middle-school homeroom.
But the assignments have practical and symbolic import, too. An assigned seat stands as a marker of a news organization’s prominence — quite literally, given that a seat in the first few rows ensures the greatest visibility. Not only are these spots the most camera-friendly for network TV correspondents, they also increase the odds of getting a question answered during crowded briefings, especially when the president makes a rare appearance.
“Look at the pictures of the first year of briefings in the Trump presidency,” said George Condon, a veteran White House correspondent for the National Journal (fifth row, far right). “[It’s] jampacked. If you didn’t have an assigned seat you had a really tough time getting a question in or even covering it. Plus, presidents since George H.W. Bush have done news conferences in the briefing room. Having an assigned seat is essential for those.”
There’s also the small matter of convenience. Reporters who don’t have an assigned seat must stand aside, physically and figuratively marginalized. Such “aisle people,” as reporter Brian Karem once dubbed his cadre of seatless colleagues, are prohibited from using the small workspaces behind the briefing room to write or produce stories; those are reserved for the press room’s seated gentry.
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