The White House has done what it can to try to limit Joe Biden’s access to the press to reduce the coverage of any potential gaffes that he might have. We saw that happen right before Christmas when the White House team booted the media right before Biden was to take questions from the nation’s governors about COVID. We hear Joe Biden say it periodically, that “they” don’t want me answering questions. It makes one wonder who the “they” are who seem to have the ability to tell the alleged most powerful man in the world what to do. But even with all the effort of the White House team, Biden still manages to get in a lot of gaffes and the media is still asking about them at the White House briefings.

But it turns out that the White House may be getting an assist from the White House Correspondents’ Association, with a hat tip to Omicron.

According to the White House Correspondents’ Association, they announced that after an emergency board meeting, they unanimously voted to “temporarily” reduce the White House briefing room to just 14 seats in response to Omicron.

“THROUGH THE OMICRON VARIANT WAVE” pic.twitter.com/4KPasE2gLT

— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) January 3, 2022

Journalist Amber Athey pointed out this was effectively cutting out people.

When the WHCA first limited briefing attendance during the pandemic, there was at least one rotating seat available to accommodate all WHCA members. Now the briefing room appears to be limited to only outlets with a previously assigned seat.

— Amber Athey (@amber_athey) January 3, 2022

Athey explained the people that usually got to stand in the aisles would be eliminated because of this. Previously during the pandemic, the smaller and independent outlets would get to sit in a rotating seat. Athey said this would now be eliminated.

What this means in practice is that there will be less representation in the briefing room from non-MSM outlets and thus likely fewer challenging Qs

— Amber Athey (@amber_athey) January 3, 2022

Note that you’ll be lucky to have one non left-leaning outlet in any given briefing day. This also doesn’t even include all WHCA members, like The Spectator. pic.twitter.com/mcpPhjDcdO

— Amber Athey (@amber_athey) January 3, 2022

So who gets dumped? This move helps the Biden team effort to protect Joe. This is about the White House briefing room, a place where they are all supposed to be vaccinated, masked, and regularly tested to get into. So that says a lot about what the WHCA thinks about the protections.

This move comes at a very convenient time when Joe Biden is facing a lot of criticism on multiple fronts, including on his response to Omicron and COVID in general, not to mention crime and inflation. For example, there are a lot of questions about the ever-shifting CDC guidance including the flip flop of Dr. Anthony Fauci. But the chances of getting any kind of answers depends to some degree on the media being willing to ask the more probing questions. This effectively reduces the number of people willing to do that.