WASHINGTON — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced an additional seat for journalists in the briefing room at her first news conference Tuesday — unveiling the rotating “new media” spot close to her podium.
The change constitutes a more modest overhaul by Leavitt than many longtime members of the White House press corps feared, with rumors circulating ahead of Tuesday’s briefing that President Trump’s media team would reassign the 49 existing press seats.
“Starting today, this seat in the front of the room, which is usually occupied by the press secretary’s staff, will be called the new media seat,” said Leavitt, 27.
“My team will review applications and give credentials to new media applicants who meet our criteria and pass United States Secret Service requirements to enter the White House complex.”
Leavitt said that the seat will be shared among an ideologically diverse set of outlets, including Beltway news website Axios and right-wing outlet Breitbart, both of which have long been represented on campus without having a permanent briefing room seat.
Axios executive editor Mike Allen, 60, who previously was the longtime author of Politico’s Playbook newsletter, asked the first question at the briefing and focused on concerns about Chinese artificial intelligence eclipsing American technology.
Breitbart’s Matt Boyle, a longtime investigative journalist and editor, was the second journalist selected and inquired about efforts to diversify media representation.
“In keeping with this revolutionary media approach that President Trump deployed during the campaign, the Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities, not just the legacy media who are seated in this room, because according to recent polling from Gallup, Americans’ trust in mass media has fallen to a record low,” Leavitt said.
“Millions of Americans, especially young people, have turned away from traditional television outlets and newspapers to consume their news from podcasts, blogs, social media and other independent outlets. It’s essential to our team that we share President Trump’s message everywhere and adapt this White House to the new media landscape in 2025.”
The new press secretary spent her inaugural briefing defending Trump’s policies on illegal immigration, foreign policy and a range of other issues.
An array of right-wing media personalities paraded down the executive mansion’s driveway ahead of Leavitt’s debut, including correspondents from Gateway Pundit, Real America’s Voice, One America News Network and Steve Bannon’s War Room.
Many of them were among the first to ask questions.
Some of those outlets previously sent representatives to the briefing room during President Trump’s first term, adding to the eccentric mix of journalists, pundits, foreign-focused writers and self-publishers who crowd the West Wing’s workspaces.
The elected board of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) by tradition allocates seats in the briefing room, and in theory government officials can reassign them at will — a possibility that stoked significant concern among those currently well-positioned in the room.
The proximity of a news outlet’s seat to the podium can influence how likely they are to be chosen to ask questions.
The briefing room’s front row includes five TV outlets — NBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS and CNN — and two news wires — The Associated Press and Reuters. Those outlets typically ask the bulk of questions, sometimes indulging in six or seven apiece, while back rows often get one or none.
The WHCA has plans to review seat assignments this year and has attempted to counsel front-row journalists — who frequently ask repetitive queries so their channel can get a clip of its own correspondent mentioning news of the day — to try to restrain themselves to allow others an opportunity to ask about matters important to their audiences.
Leavitt also said that she would reverse some of the Biden White House’s actions, including a 2023 reform that curtailed which journalists were eligible for press passes by requiring them to meet historically more stringent standards to acquire a congressional press badge.
That Biden-era move was widely interpreted as a pretext to boot journalist Simon Ateba of Today News Africa, who had often heckled then-press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about her refusal to call on him.
“Our team will work diligently to restore the press passes of the 440 journalists whose passes were wrongly revoked by the previous administration,” Leavitt said.
Journalists without permanent passes, including Ateba and others stripped of their badges, have continued to be able to access the White House grounds by requesting a “day pass” for a given date.
