Stop The Presses! Jay Carney Has Lost His Glasses!
Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew joined White House Press Secretary Jay Carney at Monday’s White House briefing to detail $467 billion in measures to pay for President Obama‘s American Jobs Act. While that’s kind of important, the real star of the show was a different set of specs: Jay Carney’s glasses. Reporters jumped over Lew to ask Carney about his ersatz eyewear, so he promised a full accounting once Lew was finished.
Carney’s glasses were brought up during Lew’s presentation, but Carney assured reporters, “I’ll get to that later.”
Once Lew was finished, and deep into the second half of the briefing, the New York Times’ Helene Cooper asked Carney, amid laughs from the press corps, “How did you break your glasses?”
Carney replied that he had lost them, and suspected that he’d left them on the bumper of his car while dealing with his son’s new bicycle, and driven off.
“So you’re blaming your son?” another reporter asked, to more laughter.
Carney owned up to the mistake, saying, “I take full responsibility for the regrettable action that resulted in the loss of my fancy new glasses.”
Here’s the clip, from The White House:
Transcript (via email from The White House)
Q Thanks, Jay. How did you break your glasses? (Laughter.)
MR. CARNEY: I am so mad about this. But I lost my glasses. (Laughter.) I was buying my son a bike for his birthday and —
Q Aww —
MR. CARNEY: I know. And I think, when I was taking it off the bike rack at home, that I had had my sunglasses on, and I had the other ones, and I think I put them on the bumper and then drove off. So — (laughter.)
Q So no more Superman?
Q You’re blaming your son, then? (Laughter.)
MR. CARNEY: I’m blaming my son — (laughter.) I take full responsibility for the regrettable action that resulted in the loss of my fancy new glasses.
Q Are you going to go back to the park and look?
MR. CARNEY: I’m going to try to rustle the money together, because I do need the prescription — the new prescription back.
It was a nearly hourlong briefing, yet the sheer number of Jay Carney eyeglass stories might lead you to believe that that was all they talked about. Granted, the President gave a short speech in the Rose Garden not long before the briefing, and it was a funny and charming moment, to be sure,but still, with an hour of substantive questions and answers from Carney and Lew, this was the takeaway?
I bring this up because I often hear complaints (sometimes even from the White House press office) about the kinds of things White House reporters focus on. What I’d like to point out is that the White House reporters are not the problem here. We ask the questions, the majority of which are substance-heavy, and news editors (and news consumers, ultimately) decide what’s important. As fascinating as I found Jack Lew’s explanation of the novel legislative process surrounding the American Jobs Act pay-fors, apparently, Jay’s glasses sell better. Who knew?
Part of the problem is that, while there is a market for substance-driven reporting, it’s a lot smaller than the audience for personality-driven stories and “food fights,” which used to matter less when journalism was more about the public interest, and less about profits, than it is now. Don’t get me wrong, the tug-of-war is nothing new (“if it bleeds, it leads” is probably engraved in hieroglyphics somewhere), but the mud pit draws ever-closer.
As a side note, devoted Prince fans will tell you that there’s a terrific illustration of this story deep in the legendary funk-rocker’s bootleg catalog. It’s a song called “Billy’s Sunglasses,” and it’s all about the ugliest he’s ever seen. The full version of the song goes on for nearly an hour, about as long as yesterday’s briefing, and it’s only about those glasses. Absurd? Yes, but also awesome.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
