April Ryan has been to dozens of White House Correspondents’ Dinners, but this year’s event stood out—for the wrong reasons.
“It was the oddest thing I’ve ever been to,” said Ryan, the longest-serving Black White House correspondent in history, on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
During the dinner, Ryan—who currently serves as the Washington Bureau Chief or BlackPressUSA—was awarded the Dunnigan-Payne Prize to honor her storied career. But the WHCA made an excruciating blunder while presenting the award.
As the association’s president Eugene Daniels took the stage to honor Ryan, the screen behind him mistakenly cut to NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor. The association had mixed up two of the political media’s best-known Black women.
“Oh, that was a bad moment,” Ryan recounted. “It was awful,” she told co-hosts Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee. “We have gone beyond that kind of time when Black people all look the same.”
Ryan said that while the incident was embarrassing for Alcindor as well, the two were able to laugh about it afterward.
“That’s my girl,” Ryan said. “I called her, “She said, ‘Hey April,’ I said, ‘No, no, no, I’m Yamiche, you’re April,’ and we got a laugh out of it.”
The atmosphere at the dinner was notably more subdued than in previous years. President Donald Trump again opted to skip the event; the association last month canceled its scheduled comedian, Amber Ruffin, following comments she made on The Daily Beast Podcast.
Coles—who also attended the dinner—noted, “It’s been a bad week for Black women with the White House Correspondents.”
Ryan, who served on the association’s board for three years in the early 2010s, agreed. “You never censor someone’s craft and their art. You never do that.”
She also reminisced over that tenure in the interview, explaining to Coles and Bee that it’s not always glitz, glamour, and endless opportunities to interview the president.
“I was in charge of the refrigerator in the kitchen that kept breaking. And we had to bring the people in when the president was gone,” Ryan said. “It was such an arduous task. I mean, people would complain about the toilets not working or (that) there’s no toilet paper in there.”
During President Trump‘s second term, however, it’s not just journalists’ appliances that are breaking down. Even outside of the WHCA, Ryan admitted that media morale has plummeted. The president has escalated his attacks on the “fake news” by demonizing longstanding journalists and barring reporters from the White House press pool.
“And once you lose ground, you never get it back,” she added. “If the president gets his way, we won’t be around.”
But Ryan isn’t give up hope just yet. She stressed that the Fourth Estate must continue as “the next line of questioning when all else fails,” including the government itself.
That being said, it won’t be easy.
“We’re all unpacking the first one hundred days of this administration,” said Bee. “I know it’s too soon to talk about when it will be over, but how are we actually going to put the horses back in the barn?”
“How are we gonna get the horses back in the barn?” asked Ryan. “Well, let’s say this—the barn has burned down. There’s no barn to go back to.”
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