White House press secretary Sean Spicer defended himself from blowback he received Tuesday after he clashed with a female reporter, April Ryan, on camera and told her to “please stop shaking your head again.”
During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Spicer said the exchange was typical of his relationship with all reporters said it would be “demeaning” to think that Ryan shouldn’t be subject to the same treatment just because of her gender.
“I think if you look at the exchanges I have with [ABC’s] Jonathan Karl or [NBC’s] Peter Alexander or a number of the other individuals in the press briefing room, Jim Acosta from CNN, we go back and forth all the time, rather heatedly, in fact,” Spicer said. “I don’t think it takes much of a search to see that we go back and forth on a lot of the things that are thrown around. And April is a tough reporter that knows how to throw it out and take it back.”
It was during Tuesday’s White House press briefing that Ryan pressed Spicer on how the Trump administration was managing to push its agenda while also dealing with other controversies that are consuming much of the president’s press coverage.
While attempting to rebut the premise of Ryan’s question, Spicer said, “Please stop shaking your head again.”
Some reporters and viewers of the briefing saw the comment as condescending and perhaps sexist.
“[T]o suggest that somehow that because of her gender or race she’d be treated differently, I think is frankly demeaning to her,” Spicer told Hewitt. “She’s a tough woman that fights every day to get out there and for her publication and for her audience to get the questions that she wants answered and I respect that.”
