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Legendary White House Correspondent April Ryan Hit by Jaw-Dropping Racial Blunder—By Own Association

A racial blunder at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner mistakenly displayed Yamiche Alcindor's image instead of April Ryan's during an award presentation.

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In an exclusive extract from a very special edition of The Swamp, we reveal the worst moment of the White House Correspondents’ Association—and the victim’s reaction to it. Sign up for all the secrets of The Swamp direct to your inbox every week..

There was no comedian. There was no president. There was no room for error.

And then there was one moment that went almost unbelievably—and awfully—wrong.

As Eugene Daniels, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association wound up to presenting the Dunnigan-Payne Award, created in 2022 to honor the first Black women to cover the White House, Alice Dunnigan and Ethel L. Payne, he began to praise one of the best-known people to follow in their path.

“Many of us are here because they kicked down some doors for us,” he said, “including BlackPressUSA’s April Ryan, who is with us tonight. This year, April has officially become the longest-serving African-American White House correspondent in history. April, Miss Dunnigan and Miss Payne would have been so proud of you and so are we.”

But behind Daniels, the screen in the Washington Hilton ball room did not cut to April Ryan—it cut to NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor. There were audible gasps at the footage mixing up two of the media’s best known—and most accomplished—Black women. Daniels was unaware of the footage being shown behind him but the rest of the room was. People could be heard shouting “that’s not April.”

Intriguingly, the version broadcast via C-Span on networks including CNN and MSNBC did not commit such an error. Instead its feed stayed focused on Daniels, then cut to Ryan.

Finally, Daniels could just be heard muttering, “That’s not her.”

But C-Span’s catch means that, luckily for the WHCA, their blunder was contained to just a few thousand people and not recorded for history. “I’d have been fired on the spot,” one TV control room veteran who had seen it unfold from her seat told The Swamp. “What were they thinking?”

The error comes after the controversy over the WHCA’s decision to axe the comedian this year. The board canceled Amber Ruffin after she told The Daily Beast Podcast‘s Samantha Bee and Joanna Coles that the organization had told her she needed to be “equal and give it to both sides,” but that playing to both sides when one was “kind of a bunch of murderers,” made them “feel like human beings when they’re not.”

When The Swamp caught up with Ryan after the dinner, she was visibly shocked by the error.

“I love Yamiche, but she was the other Black woman in the room,” she joked.

Ryan, who became a White House correspondent succeeding the pioneering Robert Munroe Ellison who posthumously received the Dunnigan-Payne Award, had plenty of praise for Daniels’ speech in defense of the free press in which he said, “We are not the enemy of the people. We are not the enemy of the state.”

“Eugene tore the house down. What he said was what was needed in the moment,” she told us.

“Our responsibility is not to align with any one party or any one of gender, but to serve the people of this country with integrity and dedication,” Daniels said in his keynote speech.

“We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public’s trust. What we are not is the opposition,” Daniels added, referring to the attacks on the media by President Donald Trump.

“What we are not is the enemy of the people,” Daniels said, without naming Trump.

The Swamp is written by David Gardner, Alyson Kreuger and Srah Ewall-Wice.