A reporter with One America News Network announced the “formal launch” of a group meant to rival the White House Correspondents’ Association.
A press release on Thursday said OANN White House correspondent Chanel Rion created the National White House Correspondents Association in April after the WHCA board voted to bar OANN from the briefing rotation. She has been showing up to the White House press briefings anyway at the invitation of the White House.
The NWHCA statement claims the WHCA “has maneuvered almost all balance and diversity out of the White House correspondents’ pool and briefing room demonstrating daily that they consider America’s free press the exclusive property of the ‘progressive’ reformers of Washington.”
The organization is reviewing applications for admittance to the group, but only those who are invited to join can apply.
“Moving forward, Rion’s NWHCA is seeking shared control of the White House briefing room and all other delegated press functions with the 117-year-old WHCA in order to restore balance to White House reporting which at present, largely amounts to a confederation of journalists with long socialist agendas and deep links to the Democrat Party,” the statement continues.
The White House Correspondents Association, which controls what outlets have seats in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, has significantly reduced the number of reporters allowed at the briefings to comply with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. The WHCA decreased the number of reporters allowed in the briefings to 14 in the spring, which followed a prior reduction from the normal 49 reporters to 25 in adherence to social distancing guidelines, even though more than 80 news outlets are represented in the WHCA.
As a part of the consolidation of media outlets, OANN was given a rotational seat that they were asked to share with Newsmax, Al Jazeera, BBC, the Christian Broadcasting Network, CNBC, the Eternal Word Television Network, Fox Business, PBS, and Univision. It was at this time that Rion kept showing up to briefings outside rotation to stand in the back of the room as a guest of the White House press office. Her workaround led the WHCA to vote OANN out from the seating rotation altogether.
The Thursday press release said that the WHCA “vote[d] to expel Rion,” but she was never a member of the WHCA, which the press release notes as well. She had applied for membership in 2019 as a part-time reporter but was denied because of a mandate that said members had to spend a majority of time at the White House, according to a person familiar with the subject. The outlet had six other employees who were members in 2019. Rion would have been eligible to join the WHCA in 2020, but she never applied.
Other people outside the WHCA have attended briefings in recent days. Last week, reporters from the Epoch Times and the Gateway Pundit showed up and were called on by the president to ask him a question.
“It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,” WHCA President Zeke Miller, a correspondent from the Associated Press, told the Washington Examiner last week.
John Solomon, the founder of Just the News and a former columnist at the Hill, floated the idea last week of a new correspondents association.
The White House, OANN, and Rion did not respond to requests for comment.
