April Ryan: Trump helps me see job more clearly
White House correspondent April Ryan says she will bring a hopeful message to the Tom Joyner Family Reunion today.
“I’m one of those who still believes, who still has hope and is optimistic about the free press and freedom of the press,” said Ryan, 50. “Because our Founding Fathers did not envision an April Ryan or a Donald Trump. And yet they put in provisions for me, and I still have hope. Sometimes we forget in the midst of all the muck and mire that we still have a voice and we still matter.”
She will be talking about her new book, “Under Fire,” about her travails in covering Trump for American Urban Radio Networks and sharing political analysis on CNN. The prominent African-American journalist has reported from the White House for 21 years, but she said the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations never presented such challenges.
“I’ve been in fights before but never on this scale,” she said. “If you ask something an administration doesn’t like, there’s a little bit of retaliation, but not to this level.”
She attributes that retaliation in part to a fear of being exposed. Her job has turned dangerous, she says. She writes of receiving death threats and thinking about quitting.
“But I won’t,” she said. “I can’t now, I cannot quit. That’s what they want me to do.”
They, she said, include the president, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other Republicans. “When I cover a Republican president, I’m considered a Democrat,” Ryan said. “When I’m covering a Democratic president, I’m considered a Republican. I must be doing my job right.”
She refuses to single out a most memorable moment in covering the Trump White House. “Every moment is memorable,” she said with a hearty laugh. “You don’t know what level of crazy or crisis you’ve stepped in each day.”
Yet in a February 2017 news conference, Trump asked Ryan to set up a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. “I’m just a reporter,” Ryan replied. At a March 2017 press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told Ryan to stop shaking her head.
Are things better with Sanders, who replaced Spicer? “Oh, no. Never. No. No,” Ryan said. “I would like for it to be better, but when you have people who try to berate you, belittle you, be condescending to you about the questions you ask … how would you be able to sit there and withstand it?”
Yet the mother of two daughters has withstood it and Trump’s exhausting work pace. “I want to focus more on policy, not all this crazy stuff about sex, lies and video and audiotape,” Ryan said.
Her book offers a withering portrait of former friend Omarosa Manigault Newman, an ex-White House aide.
Ryan said people in the administration don’t understand journalism, Washington or the White House. “They don’t understand the lofty perch that they sit in, and they treat it so casually,” Ryan said.
In concluding the book, she describes her reporting as a form of protest, but she doesn’t credit Trump.
“He just helped me see more clearly,” she said. “When there’s division and hate, all you can do is stand and keep moving forward, because I have done nothing wrong. … They want me to be afraid, they want me to back down, and I’m not. I’m just starting.”