White House reporter April Ryan says she was told by a fellow Black journalist that the only reason she gets called on during White House press briefings is because she’s Black.
Ryan makes the claim in her upcoming book, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House, and says that it happened in February 2017.
“A conservative Black female reporter had openly, in my presence, spoke the wrong words, saying, ‘The only reason you get called on is because you’re black,'” Ryan said, according to the Washington Examiner.
Ryan told the publication on Monday that the reporter, who’s unnamed in her book, is the Daily Mail’s White House reporter, Francesca Chambers.
In an excerpt from her book, obtained by the Examiner, Ryan writes:
To this day, those words don’t sit well with me, she says. At that time, I had had enough! “Yes!” I said to her. “You ain’t sh*t!” In front of everyone, asking her, “Who you think you are? You’re Black too, in case you didn’t know it!”
Ryan said that Chambers made the comment because she was upset that she wasn’t being called on by then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer, the Examiner reports.
On Tuesday, the Daily Mail released a statement to the Examiner saying, “It is a sad day for journalism when a reporter makes false claims against another reporter to sell a book.”
“Ms. Ryan knows what she has written to be false and she is also fully aware of the unacceptable way that she has treated Ms. Chambers in the White House for the past two years,” according to the statement.
