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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.”
