That’s a little naive, I think. Presidents don’t go into press conferences unprepared. In fact, if you’re going to hold a press conference at all, you’d be rather dumb not to prepare for the questions you expect to be asked. Obama watches his words, and on Iran in particular, he’s been very measured in what he has said. As well he should be.
All politicians do this. I am sure you’ve watched a presidential debate before: the missions is always to answer the question you wanted them to ask, not necessarily the one they asked.
Lots of presidential news conferences over the years have begun with announcements or comments from the President before he started taking questions. Obama could easily have indicated that a question had been relayed to him from someone in Iran and answered it, without resorting to the rigmarole of having a HuffPo “reporter” ask the question.
It doesn’t sound like a major deception, just the wrong way to handle the matter (given past instances of press conference manipulation).
Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to give the Huffington Post legitimacy, given that site’s record of dubious reporting (notably on “alternative” health issues).
That’s not where legitimacy comes from. If the established reporters are upset Obama took a question from the Huffington Post or a blog, that’s just sour grapes and they’ve got no grounds to complain, even if he was sending a message. And a question about Iran trumps “how are your wife’s arms doing?” in any event.
Why even bother with the runaround? Why didn’t he just start off the press conference by saying something like, “Before we begin, my staff brought my attention to a question asked online by a Mr. X, and I would like to answer it.”.
Iran’s been showing up on everybody’s radar. Notice other people asked him about it. I seriously doubt he had the HuffPo rep ask him about Iran to make sure someone would.
FIRST: Planted questions suck. They are used as an opportunity for the speaker to deliver a specific message.
Next UP: I freely admint I would like to give Obama the benefit of the doubt here. In that
He wanted to answer a question directly from “the groun” in Iran
He also wanted to give a boost to the legitimacy of “non mainstream media” (not neccesserily the HP per se) as a way of further developing it
He knew that the HP had access to questions from Iran - maybe to the stage of telling them ahead of time to come prepared with a LEGITIMATE and AUTHENTIC question, but did not place any conditions on what the question should be…
In reality though I admit that the truth is more likely to be that he knew what the question was. This would be the safest thing to do.
Maybe he’s having an affair with the reporter or Huffington paid him $100,000 for the publicity. There are an infinite number of possibilities. But he clearly used the reporter for the purposes of introduction a question about Iran in the first part of the news conference. The simplest explanation is that he wanted to insure he had a chance to talk about it as opposed to other important topics such as his smoking habits.
