Lloyd Grove
The Daily Beast
Yeah, he works for Fox—but Ed Henry’s a fair and tough reporter, and he’s got Clinton’s number.
If President Obama were to bequeath something noteworthy to Hillary Clinton—short of an endorsement, that is, especially now that his loyal vice president is thinking about entering the Democratic nomination race—Fox News’s Ed Henry would likely be high on his list.
The 44-year-old Henry, the chief White House correspondent for the conservative-leaning “fair and balanced” channel since July 2011, seems to have gotten under Obama’s skin on multiple occasions—like when he asked the president, during a televised press conference, to respond to a charge from a political opponent, and Obama sneeringly retorted: “I didn’t know you were the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.”
Indeed, Henry has managed to create several memorable YouTube moments with a somewhat irritated Leader of the Free World—a skill he also deployed while covering George W. Bush as CNN’s White House correspondent from 2006 to 2011.
It was Henry—after being warned never to shout at Bush, who preferred to call on reporters from a list of pre-selected names—who went ahead and shouted anyway at his first Rose Garden news conference, asking about the employment future of beleaguered defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and eliciting Bush’s famous phrase, “I’m the decider.”
Former Bush White House Press secretary Dana Perino, now a regular on Fox News’s The Five, recalls that Henry’s pointed questioning in the briefing room frequently made her scowl—a sour expression captured in photographs—while she affectionately refers to him as “a stone in my shoe.”
Former CNN-U.S. president Jonathan Klein, who was Henry’s boss, calls him “a real old-style reporter who shows no fear or favor—and it can be annoying to the target...He’s just an aggressive son of a bitch when it comes to confronting politicians—and that’s exactly what you want in your reporters.”
More here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/28/the-fox-news-thorn-in-hillary-s-side.html
