the.com/press corps

means The body of reporters regularly assigned to cover a particular institution, especially government — the people who show up to the briefings, chase the officials down hallways, and write the first draft of the day's events.

from 'Press' for news publishing goes back to the printing press itself — the machine lent its name to the whole trade of printed news by the 1600s-1700s. 'Corps' is borrowed from military vocabulary, from French corps meaning 'body' (as in corps of soldiers, a cousin of 'corpse' and 'corporate' — all tracing to Latin corpus, 'body'). Stitch them together and you get journalists organized like a military unit: a disciplined body moving together, assigned to a beat, traveling with the motorcade, standing in formation at the podium. The phrase 'press corps' took hold as covering government became an organized profession, with credentials, seating charts, and a pecking order — less a crowd of individuals than a standing unit assigned to watch power.