Just noticed a twitter from Glenn Greenwald. Ed Henry, beaming with pride . . . at self. He's an "amazing" "provocative" "gambling" "quarterback" who "pounced"Henry, you might remember, got a few seconds of infamy at last week's press conference when he demanded to know why it took Obama "days to come out and express that outrage" on the A.I.G. bonuses. This provoked a nice riposte from the President. "It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak."Obama's jab is even more cutting in context of Henrys comically self-congratulatory column today. You might ask, for instance, why Henry decided to ask abut A.I.G., rather than about, say, the Geithner bailout plan. henry takes us through his thinking: "The pressure was on now because the president had called on me. Someone handed me a microphone, millions were watching, and it's scary to think about changing topic in a split second because you might get flustered and screw up. But it's fun to gamble and like any good quarterback (though I was never athletic enough to actually play the position), I decided to call an audible."An audible. Alrighty. But more interesting than Ed Henry's high opinion of Ed Henry is the strategy that he took into the press conference.
At the first presser in February, I was about the 10th reporter the president called on. The economy had been chewed over so I went with a "sidebar" question about whether Obama, given his push for transparency, would overturn the policy at Dover Air Force Base preventing media coverage of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.It was a surprise line of inquiry. The president made news by saying the policy was under review -- and a few weeks later he overturned it.I was heading into this event with the same strategy: make news on something unexpected (I won't tell you which topics I was working on cause it would ruin the surprise for a future presser or interview with the president).
"Make news" is an interesting formulation for a reporter. I'm pretty sure the J School graduates are taught to "report" news, or maybe "explain" news. But creating news is rather a different goal. Inserting himself into the story, however, is well-aligned with Ed Henry's incentives. A lot more people know Ed Henry's name today than did a week ago. Henry can now write a column congratulating himself for standing tall in the face of the President's ire. It's similarly well-aligned with his industry's incentives. Though the American people might appreciate seeing the President offer a substantive explanation of his policy ideas -- 32 million of them, after all, watched the press conference for exactly that -- it's not the sort of thing that the cable channels can replay in bite-sized chunks. They're better off "making" a new news story that can lead tomorrow's Situation Room.
