WASHINGTON — The White Home press workplace has obtained 7,400 requests from individuals eager about occupying a newly introduced briefing room seat for “new media,” The Publish has confirmed.
The attention-popping flood got here lower than 24 hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s first briefing Tuesday afternoon, at which she introduced the brand new fiftieth seat for journalists.
A White Home official informed The Publish the press workplace is “excited about the interest” — although it’s not instantly clear how staffers will sift by way of the mountain of requests, the variety of which was first reported by the Each day Wire.
Leavitt, 27, introduced that the “new media” seat can be stuffed on a rotating foundation by shops and people who lack a everlasting task to one of many 49 conventional media seats which might be assigned by the White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation.
The seat is situated to the best of the press secretary’s lectern and traditionally was occupied by a member of the press workplace’s employees.
At Leavitt’s inaugural briefing, the seat was stuffed by Axios government editor Mike Allen, who requested the primary query.
Allen was adopted by Breitbart journalist Matt Boyle, whose outlet additionally lacks a everlasting seat — although the brand new media slot additionally is predicted to be stuffed by social media figures with important followings.
A White Home web site kind asks candidates to offer a hyperlink to their main social account.
The creation of the brand new seat adopted rumors that President Trump’s staff would finish deference to the Correspondents’ Affiliation and completely redo the seating chart.
The choice so as to add a brand new seat prevented a combat with journalists that threatened to distract from Trump’s bold early-term push for laws and his rollout of government orders.
Leavitt framed the choice as a approach to increase illustration — along with revoking a 2023 Biden White Home coverage that stripped journalists of everlasting press passes in the event that they lacked extra stringent congressional press credentials.
“The Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities, not just the legacy media who are seated in this room, because according to recent polling from Gallup, Americans’ trust in mass media has fallen to a record low,” Leavitt mentioned at her first briefing.
“Millions of Americans, especially young people, have turned from traditional television outlets and newspapers to consume their news from podcasts, blogs, social media and other independent outlets. It’s essential to our team that we share President Trump’s message everywhere and adapt this White House to the new media landscape in 2025.”
Leavitt added that “this White House believes strongly in the First Amendment, so it’s why our team will work diligently to restore the press passes of the 440 journalists whose passes were wrongly revoked by the previous administration.”
The brand new Trump press staff has not but divulged the destiny of a Biden-era prescreening course of that was used to bar main information shops, together with The Publish, from massive occasions that underneath previous presidents had been open to all journalists on campus.
That screening course of initially was premised upon the COVID-19 pandemic however continued all through President Biden’s four-year time period — drawing press corps protests.
It was broadly understood as a means of shaping the number of questions posed to Biden and generally resulted in journalists being refused entry on account of “space limitations” regardless of as many as two dozen empty press seats.
