Fox News are among media outlets looking to grab the now-vacant seat held by Helen Thomas, who resigned as White House press icon Monday.

WASHINGTON - Long before Helen Thomas resigned under fire Monday, Fox News had trained its sights on grabbing her coveted front-row seat in the White House briefing room.

Sources within the White House Correspondents' Association, which oversees the seating chart, told the Daily News that Fox, the nation's largest cable news outlet, has argued for years it belongs in the front row, where CNN, ABC and MSNBC (represented by NBC) already reside with the Associated Press and Reuters.

Media sources said The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg News and Washington Post are also making pitches for the now-vacant prime real estate.

The association board plans to decide as early as Thursday who gets the seat.

The uproar over Thomas' anti-Israel remarks triggered a feeding frenzy in the briefing room as other news organizations maneuvered to move their own seats up in the musical chairs sweepstakes.

In the George W. Bush administration, press secretary Ari Fleischer - who led the charge to get Thomas fired over the weekend - pressured the correspondents' association to alter the seating chart. He managed to get some organizations considered sympathetic to the administration better seats in the pecking order.

When Thomas left United Press International after the Unification Church bought the wire service in 2000, she would normally have had to relinquish the seat. But she kept what became known as "the Helen Thomas seat" out of respect for her long and distinguished tenure as a White House regular.

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