The Big Ten Network has uploaded the part of Tom Izzo's press conference where he took questions from the media for nearly 37 minutes. While many of his answers were very interesting, the main focus of the Q&A session was on when Izzo went toe to toe with Lynn Henning of the Detroit News. The back and forth lasted for 10 or so minutes and touched on a number of topics involving the media and their coverage of this story.
The context of this whole Henning/Izzo thing (it starts at the 13:20 mark of the video at the end of this post) is that Henning had a problem with some comments MSU president Lou Ann K. Simon made about how the media covered this story. Athletic director Mark Hollis reiterated the general theme that the media was careless with how this story was handled, and Henning decided to use Izzo's press conference as a forum to express his displeasure with comments that were, in his view, a "blanket indictment of media."
From there this thing snowballed into what was essentially a debate about the media. First Henning lectured Izzo about how MSU provided such little information throughout this whole process. Izzo then pointed out that Henning had not been around the MSU program very much in recent years and proceeded to call him out for his awful column about how it was too late for Izzo to return to MSU. Then Izzo discussed his approach to handling the media and why some experiences from this past year have changed how he interacts with reporters and journalists.
It looked like this bizarre episode was about to come to a close, but Henning continued it by once again making himself the story as he jokingly complained about not being invited to a dinner or luncheon Izzo had with local media members. The purpose of the meeting was for Izzo to get feedback from the local media members that cover the MSU basketball program on a daily basis and to get everybody on the same page. For some reason Henning seemed genuinely upset that he was left out, which makes no sense since he is not a beat reporter for MSU basketball.
In general Henning really came off as looking quite idiotic throughout this whole back and forth between he and Izzo. Aside from the fact that Henning hijacked the press conference and inserted himself into the story, his sense of entitlement was quite pathetic. Neither Izzo nor MSU owed Henning information about every detail that was going on with the Cavs job, and the fact that Henning was so upset over everything was quite lame. What's more, if he had such a big problem with how all of this went down, then he should have talked to Izzo privately on his own time, not in the middle of a press conference. The whole thing reeked of Henning wanting attention, which shouldn't come as a surprise considering he wrote such a radical, attention-seeking column the other day.
Anyways, the video can be found below, and as stated earlier, the Henning episode starts at the 13:20 mark.
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