*If you know anything about Omarosa Mannigault, you won’t be surprised to learn that she walked out of a National Newspaper Publishers Association/NNPA meeting after a reporter Hazel Trice Edney asked her a “tough question,” according to the AFRO.
The longtime black owned news outlet reports that during the March 23 breakfast meeting – which Omarosa (President Donald Trump’s director of communications for public liaison) asked the Chair of the group (Denise Rolark Barnes) to attend – stormed out of the room and freaking out many of those that witnessed her do it.
In typical fashion for Omarosa, during opening remarks, she was all giggles and smiles, praising black journalists for historically asking “the tough questions.” But then reality sat in when Trice Edney asked the minister and former reality TV star about not following up on Trump’s promised “first interview” with NNPA President Benjamin Chavis, she abruptly morphed into the indignant hellcat you’ve seen her be on “The Apprentice.” At that point, it seems it got personal.
Check out how Trice Edney broke it all down. It started with Omarosa’s response:
“Ben Chavis was never promised the first interview. He was promised an interview, but not the first. And I was very surprised because we’ve always had a great working relationship, Hazel, that you wrote such a dishonest story [published Jan. 8] about a closed off the record meeting that I invited NNPA to make sure that we had a great relationship, that we started early. I was really surprised that you made that a press story because that was inaccurate. And moreover, you weren’t in the room.”
“It was not inaccurate,” Edney responded. “I have my sources right here. The question is when is the interview going to take place? That’s the question.”
Manigault responded, “We’ve been working for months because we have that kind of relationship…We had been working very closely to make sure that NNPA was on the front row and at the forefront of what happened. Your article did more damage to NNPA and their relationship with the White House because it’s not just me. So you attack me, they circle the wagons. So you can keep attacking me and they will continue to circle the wagons, but that does not advance the agenda of what NNPA is doing,
“I’m going to continue to work with Ben Chavis, who I adore, to make sure that we do what we said we were going to do. Interestingly enough, we were just talking about this privately over here. And so, if you want to make another headline or do another story about it, I think that is really not professional journalism.”
This reporter responded, “It’s professional journalism.”
After this exchange, Manigault abruptly walked out a little more than 10 minutes after arriving.
Many publishers were aghast, with at least one attendant, GOP consultant and pundit, Paris Dennard, defending Manigault
You can find out what Paris Dennard had to say and you can get the rest of the story at the AFRO.
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