海角大神

Drumroll please.... The winner of the great Helen Thomas briefing room seat sweepstakes is Fox News. And the Associated Press.

The AP will occupy the seat of the legendary, now-retired White House correspondent 鈥� front row, center 鈥� in the White House鈥檚 Brady briefing room, and Fox News will get the AP鈥檚 old seat 鈥� second from the left, front row. The real plum is being in the front row, and that鈥檚 what all the fuss was about.

The issue came to the fore in June, when Ms. Thomas was caught on video making nasty comments about Israel and Jews, and she summarily retired. Thomas, who turns 90 on Wednesday, had covered the White House since the Eisenhower administration, most of the time for UPI but most recently as a columnist for Hearst.

Three news organizations vied for the promotion to the front row: Fox, Bloomberg, and NPR. The board of the White House Correspondents鈥� Association (WHCA), the sole arbiter of this question, decided that no news organization would move up more than one row, and so that eliminated NPR, which had been in the third row. (NPR鈥檚 consolation prize is a promotion to the second row, center seat.)

So it boiled down to Fox versus Bloomberg. The decision was a close call, says Julie Mason, White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a WHCA board member. Fox won, she says, because it 鈥済ets a lot more of [its] stories from the briefing, whereas Bloomberg鈥檚 good journalism doesn鈥檛 really come out of the briefing; it comes from their own reporting.鈥�

In its announcement to members, including this reporter, the WHCA board said it 鈥渦ltimately was persuaded by Fox鈥檚 length of service and commitment to the White House television pool.鈥�

Participation in the 鈥減ool,鈥� a consortium of news outlets that take turns following the president, is expensive when travel is involved, especially for television, which involves more than just a reporter.

The kerfuffle around this seemingly minor adjustment to the briefing-room seating chart became a cause c茅l猫bre for the liberal activist groups MoveOn and CREDO Action, which agitated on behalf of NPR and against Fox. The groups collected nearly half a million signatures and shipped them to the WHCA board in boxes. Liberal activists hold particular animus toward Fox, which they see as not a news organization but 鈥渢he right-wing noise machine鈥檚 key propaganda outlet,鈥� to quote CREDO.

The Obama administration, which holds no love for Fox鈥檚 commentators, has no problem with its White House reporters.

As for how the White House viewed the whole circus around the vacant seat, Ms. Mason says, 鈥淚 think they just observed from a bemused distance.鈥�