White House press corps banned out-of-synch Asian American

FPI / April 8, 2020

Leftist media personalities who control the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) attempted to banish a conservative reporter from White House briefings after the reporter called out the major media for spouting Chinese propaganda on the coronavirus, a report said.

The WHCA on April 1 voted to ban One American News Network (OAN) White House correspondent Chanel Rion from the daily Coronavirus Task Force press briefings. Rion's bio page states she was born in Texas but lived several years in South Korea where she learned her mother's native language.

Her “sin” was asking President Donald Trump "a question that hit too close to home, after various White House correspondents had used the race card against President Trump for calling the virus that originated in China the 'Chinese virus.' " FrontPage Magazine noted in an April 6 report.

At the March 19 briefing, Rion introduced the concern that “major left-wing media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese communist party narratives,” and asked Trump to comment.

The president responded: “It amazes me when I read the things that I read.”

WHCA partisan quickly sprung into retaliatory action against Rion, first by leaving an anonymous note on her desk asking her whether she thought her question was helpful in halting the spread of the coronavirus, the FrontPage Magazine report noted. "Three days later, the White House Correspondents Association mandated that the seat assigned to OAN since 2017, which for years was shared by only one other news organization, now accommodate five networks, including Al Jazeera."

OAN was placed in the “supplemental Seat Rotation,” a shared seat with a total of 10 media outlets.

"OAN for all intents and purposes lost any reasonable opportunity to participate in the briefings as a result of the WHCA’s discriminatory edict," the FrontPage Magazine report said. "When OAN managed to secure an invitation from the White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham for Rion to stand in the back of the briefing room, the White House Correspondents Association dropped the hammer and sought to close the briefing room door to OAN altogether."

Rion tweeted: "At the White House, I asked about Chinese Propaganda peddled by press in the White House... WHCA members had a meltdown. So they removed OAN from their little chair club."

FrontPage Magazine noted that CNN’s Jim Acosta and Oliver Darcy attempted to "rationalize" the WHCA's action by claiming that the decision to banish OAN "was made after a fringe personality for the far-right media outlet, Chanel Rion, continued to attend the briefings, in defiance of the WHCA's new rules limiting the number of journalists in the room.”

"Remember how Acosta whined when his White House press credentials were suspended for good reason back in 2018? Now he leads the leftwing media mob in smearing OAN and trying to block its access to the White House briefing room in contravention of OAN’s constitutional right of freedom of the press," FrontPage Magazine said.

But the move by the leftist members of the WHCA didn’t work. Rion communicated with Grisham and received another invitation to attend the April 2 White House press briefing. Rion not only appeared at the briefing, Trump called on her for a question, and the leftist media personalities were outraged.

“Trump makes sure to take a question from OAN staffer Chanel Rion even though she was banished from the White House Correspondents’ Association for attending briefings she wasn’t supposed to be at,” leftist Vox reporter Aaron Rupar tweeted.

Free Press International