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TOP OF THE DAY by Howard Polskin

Feb. 5, 2026

Greetings!  The White House Briefing Room has a new seating chart. NewsBusters appears to have had the story first last night. Where journos sit in this room – ground zero for the heart and soul of the White House press corps — can either be taken as a barometer of the  power of their respective organizations or a symbol of their decline. New to the Briefing Room are the Daily Wire, The Telegraph and Black Press USA. Axios, NOTUS and  Semafor are also newcomers.  Those finding themselves seatless:  the Voice of America, McClatchy newspapers and Yahoo News…Jeff Bezos just pulled into first place as the country’s most vilified billionaire after axing more than 300 journalists from the newsroom of the Washington Post. Since 2017, the slogan of the newspaper he owns reads, “Democracy Dies in the Darkness.” With the gutting of his legendary newspaper, an essential read in our nation’s capital, and power centers here and abroad, the world just got darker.  Worth noting: FrontPage defends the massive newsroom cuts. “Bezos is many things, but a weak sister isn’t one of them, and he didn’t spend $250 million to maintain it as a place for entitled journos to defy his interests and badmouth him,” writes Daniel Greenfield…Good NY Times roundup of the flood of books being published by possible 2028 White House wannabes.  It includes tomes by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA)…If you keep reading, I’ll keep Righting. Howard