Alyssa Farah Griffin, the newest Republican co-host of ABC’s “The View,” spent part of Thursday’s broadcast commiserating with TheGrio’s White House correspondent April Ryan over a shared experience with former President Donald Trump — and suggesting that Ryan had been successful in avoiding making herself part of the story.
Griffin and her co-hosts spoke with Ryan on the midday talk show, and the conversation turned to Trump — and the fact that Ryan, like so many other Left-leaning reporters, had clashed with him on live television on a number of occasions.
WATCH:
Sara Haines whines about "disinformation" and asks Ryan to address the public's low trust in the press. "I make sure I have receipts … I make it rain with receipts," she declared.
And yet, she accused former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of lying about baking a pie. pic.twitter.com/Nkk0FoIICg— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) October 20, 2022
“You and I share something in common,” Griffin began. “Having been called demeaning and cruel names by the former president. Now, of course, when you were, you were simply doing your job as a journalist. How did you balance in that environment a) not making yourself the story but then also what advice would you give to aspiring journalists in an environment that can be very hostile to press?”
“They didn’t tell me I needed a combat hat — a shield when I went into the White House,” Ryan said of her education.
Ryan then argued that people who criticized media were part of the problem, claiming that they often attacked journalists because they were adherents of “an ideology that is pushing the press, the First Amendment down.” She went on to argue that it continued in part because most Americans did not truly understand civics.
Co-host Sara Haines jumped into the conversation, lamenting the amount of “disinformation” that was ubiquitous in media, and asked Ryan how she worked to fight against that and the fact that trust in media has recently hit all-time lows.
“I make sure I have receipts,” Ryan said. “I make it rain with receipts.”
Ryan became a household name during the Trump administration in part because she attacked then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, suggesting that a photo of a home-baked pie in Sanders’ social media post was actually a stock photo.
When Sanders, who often sparred with Ryan in the briefing room, gamely offered to bake another — thus proving its veracity — Ryan demurred and suggested that she’d be afraid to eat anything Sanders baked because it might be poisoned.