According to a senior official, the White House plans to assume responsibility for press briefing room seating assignments as part of the Trump administration’s most recent display of control over the press corps.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, an independent organization that currently distributes seats and oversees relations between the White House and the press corps, might oppose the plan.

Some Trump supporters applauded the news when Axios reported on the possible seating chart changes on Sunday morning, seeing it as another attempt to limit the mainstream media establishment and strengthen overtly pro-Trump opinion sites.

Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary from his first term, wrote to his counterpart Karoline Leavitt on X, “Yes to this – keep it going @PressSec.”

CNN was informed of the plan by a senior White House official, who did not elaborate.

According to a number of correspondents, a reorganization of the seating chart has been anticipated because the changes will be symbolic and welcomed by pro-Trump media outlets. Since their employers had not given them permission to speak in public, the sources spoke under the condition of anonymity.

According to a White House correspondent, “where people sit doesn’t really matter.” “But it does matter when the White House attempts to take control away from an elected group in order to influence what questions are asked and how stories are covered.”

That organization is the Correspondents’ Association, which is run by a revolving board of journalists chosen by their fellow journalists.

A request for comment regarding the status of the seating chart was not answered by Eugene Daniels, the group’s current president. According to reports, the association is taking into account a variety of potential answers.

One significant unknown is whether the administration plans to simply rearrange who sits where or remove certain major news outlets from their designated seats.

However, the dynamic during Leavitt’s briefings could be altered by even a seemingly small reordering.

Journalists from the nation’s largest TV networks, newswires, newspapers, and radio networks currently occupy the front seats under the association’s seating chart. Numerous other reputable news organizations have also been given seats; some of them alternate so that 49 seats can accommodate more than 60 outlets.

The association revises the seating chart every few years to account for shifts in the media environment. According to its website, it also allocates “all booths and desks” in the White House workspace for the news media.

Since Trump returned to office in January, the association has been the target of harsh criticism from the Trump White House. According to some correspondents, Trump wants to completely eradicate the group.

Trump forbade The Associated Press, which has been a mainstay of White House coverage for over a century, from attending press conferences and other events in February. Leavitt then claimed that the White House would select the reporters from the “press pool” who accompany the president on his trips and at his small-scale events, depriving the association of its long-standing responsibility for pool organization.

The White House has invited relatively low-rated TV networks and hyperpartisan pro-Trump websites to join the fray in recent weeks. When an employee of the far-right channel One America News disguised a compliment as a question on Friday, Trump exclaimed, “I love this guy.”

At her press briefings, Leavitt has also pushed right-wing podcasters and nonconformist authors by transforming a White House aide’s seat into a “new media seat.”

The Defense Department’s so-called “rotation” program, which kicked large news organizations like NPR and CNN out of their Pentagon workspaces and replaced them with smaller, fiercely pro-Trump media outlets, has prepared longtime correspondents for more changes.

Every disruption has pointed in the same predictable direction: toward media coverage that upholds the administration’s agenda rather than challenging it.

Right-wing podcasters and online content producers would probably be added to a Trump-controlled briefing seating chart, though the White House might encounter some real-world obstacles. Many of the conservative opinion show hosts and pro-Trump personalities who have large online followings don’t reside in Washington, DC, and aren’t particularly inclined to attend press conferences.

When the capacity of the briefing room was lowered for health reasons in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was instructed to swap her first-row seat with a reporter in the back row. The White House gave in after both reporters declined.

“There is a decades-long bipartisan tradition of the WHCA determining the seating assignments in the briefing room,” stated Jonathan Karl, the association’s president at the time, adding that “we will challenge any effort to pick and choose what outlets are there or the manner in which they are in there.”