• B&C, Sunday, August 1, 2010 10:32 PM

The board of the White House Correspondents Assocation has decided to move the Associated Press to the front-row center seat in the White House briefing room, reports B&C. It gets the seat that had been held by UPI's Helen Thomas, who retired after her anti-Semitic remarks were roundly criticized.

Fox, will move up from the second row to AP's front row-seat, and NPR will move to Fox's second-row seat next to Bloomberg. The board further agreed to move Fox News to the front row seat previously occupied by AP, and relocate NPR into the second row seat previously held by Fox, next to Bloomberg News.

Bloomberg's Al Hunt argued that "Bloomberg is the fastest-growing news organization in the world," while NPR's David Sweeney emphasized the network's audience size, reach and four decades of White House coverage.

In the final days before the vote, two liberal groups campaigned to block Fox's bid. CREDO Action, a liberal activist mobile phone company that has gone after Fox in the past, launched a petition to put NPR in the seat instead, and MoveOn.org put out a statement supporting the petition, notes Politico.

Read the whole story at B&C »