The rise and rise of Rupert Murdoch‘s Fox News has been enshrined in physical form with the award of a front-row seat in the White House briefing room to the caustic rightwing channel.
Fox News has joined the three main TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBS, cable station CNN and news agencies AP and Reuters, in the coveted front row of the room, where daily press conferences are held. The seating arrangements are more than symbolic as it helps to determine who is called by Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s press secretary, to ask questions.
It marks something of a coming of age for the channel, which was formed in 1996 and has succeeded in shaking up the world of television news with its mix of highly partisan rightwing commentary and often heavily editorialised news. The channel has increasingly been making inroads against its competitors, notably the more politically moderate CNN.
Opponents of Fox News drew comfort from the fact the channel did not gain its preferred position: the central front-row seat it had sought. That seat, previously occupied by veteran reporter Helen Thomas, went to the Associated Press.
Two prominent liberal grassroots campaigns, Credo Action and Moveon.org, had organised a petition against Fox News being given the central seat. Credo Action said almost 500,000 people had backed the protest.
The group’s political director, Becky Bond, said: “We want people to understand that Fox News is not a real news operation but an important part of the rightwing noise machine in the US. It’s more a propaganda machine than a news channel.”
The decision about how to shuffle the chairs fell to the White House Correspondents’ Association, a self-policing organisation of reporters. The board said the decision was very difficult but it had ultimately been persuaded by Fox’s “length of service and commitment to the White House television pool”.One of its board members, Julie Mason of the Washington Examiner, dismissed the Credo Action petition as “smearing our colleagues”. The new seating arrangement was preceded by weeks of back corridor lobbying by news agencies. Ed Chen, a reporter for Bloomberg, described the jockeying as being like “musical chairs in elementary school except it has the cut-throat viciousness of a snake pit”.
Originally reported by the Guardian. Read the original article here.
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