Trump White House To Add 'Skype Seats' To Press Briefing Room
Donald Trump hasn’t had the best relationship with the press over the course of his successful bid to become President of the United States. Despite that history, his administration announced on Monday it would open up “Skype seats” in the White House press room that would allow remote journalists to have access to briefings.
The announcement came on Monday from press secretary Sean Spicer, who said there would be four of the so called Skype seats added to the White house briefing room.
According to Spicer, the addition of the virtual seats will “open up the briefing to journalists who live beyond 50 miles of the Washington, D.C. area and to organizations that don’t currently have a hard pass.”
A hard pass is a renewable two-year permit that grants ongoing access to the White House. Members of the press can also apply for day passes, which must be applied for each time a person wants to get in.
Spicer said the seats would open up the briefing room to a “diverse group of journalists from around the country who may not have the convenience or funding to travel to Washington” or access press briefings.
“I think this can benefit us all by giving a platform to voices that are not necessarily based here in the Beltway,” he said.
Details on how the Skype seats would work—as well as who would have the ability to use them—were sparse. The initiative to allow remote journalists the ability to call in to the press briefings will begin later this week.
The decision to add Skype seats comes just over a week after a report that the Trump administration may evict the press from the White House entirely and relocate them to a building off the premises of the executive branch.
“As you know, we’re all about big viewerships and large audiences here,” Spicer said when announcing the effort—a reference to his first press conference held on Saturday afternoon when he scolded the press for what he deemed to be misleading information regarding the crowd size of Trump’s inaugural address.
Spicer’s combative and demonstrably false claims—he said it was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” despite there being fewer people in attendance and fewer people watching on television than for President Obama’s first inauguration.
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