Washington – Long before Helen Thomas resigned under fire Monday, Fox News had trained its sights on grabbing her coveted front-row seat in the White House briefing room.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Sources within the White House Correspondents’ Association, which oversees the seating chart, told the Daily News that Fox, the nation’s largest cable news outlet, has argued for years it belongs in the front row, where CNN, ABC and MSNBC (represented by NBC) already reside with the Associated Press and Reuters.
Media sources said The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg News and Washington Post are also making pitches for the now-vacant prime real estate.
The association board plans to decide as early as Thursday who gets the seat.
The uproar over Thomas’ anti-Israel remarks triggered a feeding frenzy in the briefing room as other news organizations maneuvered to move their own seats up in the musical chairs sweepstakes.
In the George W. Bush administration, press secretary Ari Fleischer – who led the charge to get Thomas fired over the weekend – pressured the correspondents’ association to alter the seating chart. He managed to get some organizations considered sympathetic to the administration better seats in the pecking order.
When Thomas left United Press International after the Unification Church bought the wire service in 2000, she would normally have had to relinquish the seat. But she kept what became known as “the Helen Thomas seat” out of respect for her long and distinguished tenure as a White House regular.
Gotta love it. Her body’s still warm and they’re fighting over the machasheifa’s mokom kavu’ah!
These people think too much of themselves. They should have a rule that the same person can’t sit in the same seat twice until everyone else in the room has sat there.
Fox news (FNC cable network) makes more money from their commercials and has a bigger listening audience then ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC combine!
Go Fox, the most pro-Israel network in the USA.
FOX may be the biggest but I would be surprised if this ‘open’ administration doesn’t block their getting this seat
The white house will barf if they have to look at a Fox correspondent every day in the front row….they’d rather reconfigure the seating arrangements than have Major Garrett in front of the podium.
obama will never allow fox to sit there, due to their accurate news, and not worshiping the annointed one.
#2 you must be a second grade teacher
flip a coin or play musical chairs
They should have a lottery.
Ha, they’re all thrilled she’s gone.
go fox i hope you get that seat. at least obama will know he will have some true tough questions to answer in front of his face.
And now the true ignorance is shown.
O’Reily, Hannity, Beck, etc.are not part of the Fox News Channel NEWS team. They are editorial “infotainers”, no different than Larry King, Keith Olberman, or Alan Colmes. They have nothing to do with reporting “NEWS”. They are not even bound by any journalistic principles (as is obvious to any educated person) because they are not considered “journalists”. Shep Smith, Chris Wallace, John Scott, etc. are the JOURNALISTS of FNC. Those of you who think that you are getting factual news from O’Reily, Hannity, Beck, etc. are truly nuts. They make up any story they want (as they do almost EVERY day). It is no different from Olberman and Maddow on MSNBC who do the very same thing.
It just shows how ignorant so many people are. Anyone who actually believes what these people say just show how uneducated and uninformed they really are. It is a sad reflection of how poor our education system is. As well, it is an even more sad reflection of what these buffoons have done to the conservative movement of William F. Buckley which was built on honesty and principle.
fox news is the only news station left that is not “left”
everyone else reports fiction, fox reports news
thats why they probably won’t get that seat…
PMO, Helen Thomas was not a journalist either. She was (a very opinionated) Columnist for hearst. Yet, that never stopped her from getting the most coveted seat and being front & center to ask her stupid biased questions for decades.
Anyone remember her asking Bush jr. When he was going to stop killing babies? How about during the first gulf war when she couldn’t ask anything but about the alleged Iraqi “baby milk” factory that was blown up.
She was a journalist????
It doesn’t make a difference. Big O hasn’t held a press conference in almost a year. Whoever ends up with that seat won’t be doing a whole lot with it.