Reuters White House Correspondent Jeff Mason was elected president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, for the 2016-2017 season, on Wednesday.
Mason will become the fifth Reuters correspondent to serve as president of the association, following in the footsteps of Ralph Harris, Larry McQuillan, Steve Holland and Caren Bohan, and will preside over the annual WHCA dinner in the spring of 2017.
Mason beat challenger Fox News White House producer Wes Barrett by a margin of 149 votes, with the final count coming in at Jeff with 172 votes vs Barrett with 23 votes.
Mason has covered the White House for Reuters since 2009. He was the lead correspondent for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and has been posted in Washington since 2008, when he covered the historic race between Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
He has also been posted in Frankfurt, Germany, where he covered the airline industry and Brussels, Belgium, where he covered climate change and the European Union. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a former Fulbright scholar.
