Scramble to fill White House press chair vacated by Helen Thomas

How much should you care about where you sit at a daily press conference? Quite a lot, judging by the unseemly scramble that is now going on to fill an empty place in the front row of the White House briefing room. The seat was vacated earlier this week by Helen Thomas , who made an abrupt departure having provoked a storm of protest by calling on Israel to "get the hell out of Palestine". No sooner was Thomas out of the door than the battle began over who should take her place, which Ed Chen, a Bloomberg reporter, described as being like "musical chairs in elementary school … except it has the cut-throat viciousness of a snake pit". Thomas, who in recent years worked for the Hearst group of newspapers, sat in the centre seat in the front row of the briefing room, right under the nose of Robert Gibbs, press secretary to Barack Obama. Gibbs has a way of calling on questions from reporters in order of their seniority, as reflected in their position in the room. First he turns to the front row, where Thomas sat and which also seats the big three TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, cable TV news channel CNN and agencies AP and Reuters. By the second row things are already getting a bit second cousin. There's the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, titans among newspapers but under the shadow of television. And by the time you get to the seventh and last row of seats, you are a nobody. Cheryl Bolen, a reporter for BNA, complained to the Wall Street Journal that since she joined the briefings last October Gibbs had not once invited her to ask a question. Frontrunners to take Thomas's place are Fox News, which would give a new rightwing flavour to the proceedings, and Bloomberg. But that would just be to propagate the status quo, argued political blogger Andrew Sullivan . "Why not allow bloggers in the front row? We'd sure make the awful, smug,smug, useless Gibbs less comfortable."