from Hacker News

The White House is adding four ‘Skype Seats’ to its press briefings

by pearlsteinj on 1/23/17, 9:19 PM with 45 comments

  • by jcranmer on 1/23/17, 11:52 PM

    The White House's press room is actually a rather small room, and there are only 49 chairs in the room. You can see some of the pictures at Wikipedia and from links thereof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._Brady_Press_Briefing_...).

    One thing that is worth pointing out is that the chairs are all assigned seating to specific news organizations. This assignment is NOT done by the White House but the White House Correspondents' Association. So the Trump administration can't decide to, say, replace the Christian Science Monitor's or Al Jazeera's seat with Breitbart News.

    The linked article doesn't discuss who is going to be allocating these virtual seats--and I rather suspect that it's going to be decided by the White House and not the White House Correspondents' Association. It's disappointing that the article doesn't mention this, since knowing the answer to this question is what really sets the purpose of the move. If it is to be given to the White House Correspondents' Association, then it is likely an attempt to give voice to a wider range of media... but if it's White House-controlled, then it's more likely an attempt to guide press briefings to only considering questions from more compliant news organizations.

    Edit: There are 49 seats, not the 42 that I originally stated.

  • by taserian on 1/23/17, 10:55 PM

    Why use the "Skype" branding? Why not call them simply "video feed seats"?

  • by jorblumesea on 1/23/17, 11:06 PM

    So basically, mainstream media is asking us annoying questions so we'll field them from people we like. Bets on how many of these Skype seats go to alt-right platforms and blogs? Bets on how often questions are fielded to these participants vs traditional media?

  • by microDude on 1/23/17, 10:45 PM

    Ok, so Breitbart has a seat now. Who else?

  • by losvedir on 1/23/17, 10:49 PM

    Is the White House press briefing not televised/streamed already? Or is this just for the question asking aspect of it?

  • by droithomme on 1/23/17, 11:38 PM

    This is pretty cool news to be sure. About time we had an administration in line with modern tech reality.

  • by ionforce on 1/23/17, 10:58 PM

    This is another opportunity to hide the physicality of the room. The Skype members probably won't have the same viewpoint that reporters in the room will have. Easier to spin noises in the background.