Yesterday, I finally got around to reading the Rolling Stone profile of Stanley McChrystal that led to the general’s downfall. After digesting the piece, what really struck me was that the controversial remarks by McChrystal and his aides about the administration, which ended up costing McChrystal his job, were actually a relatively small part of the story and, I would argue, not even the best journalism in the piece.

On the Rolling Stone site, the article is split into six pages. If you break it down, the parts of the article that actually deal with the now infamous snipes only make up about one page. The more interesting parts, at least to me, were the last three pages of the story, which paint a picture of a general struggling to win the war and, more disconcertingly, struggling to deal with his troops’ increasing anger and frustration over the counterinsurgency policy he’s pushing. For someone like me, who doesn’t follow the developments of the war in Afghanistan very closely beyond what tidbits I pick up on NPR on the evening commute (usually stories about the latest casualties), it was an informative and revealing look. Unfortunately, that has gotten nary a mention amid all the hoopla over the remarks about the administration.

As for the badmouthing of the administration, my main reaction to it was more or less a shrug. Considering the stakes, the amount of power involved, and the stature of the players, one would be surprised if there weren’t clashes, and there already had been reports about past tensions. The surprise in this isn’t that the general and (quite reasonably) his aides don’t like certain members of the administration and talk smack about them behind their backs, but just that they would be so careless as to say those things within earshot of a reporter in their traveling party.

And then there’s the matter of the fallout from the report. In this interview with MSNBC, Michael Hastings, the author of the article, said that the soldiers he had been talking to after the firing say they are glad about the change in leadership. But note the reason for which they were glad — they weren’t glad to see the general get canned because he had a strained relationship with the administration, but rather because they disagreed with his policy.

Was McChrystal fired for the ineffectiveness of his policy? For his role in previous scandals? For losing the support of his troops? No. He was fired for a couple careless remarks to a reporter about certain members of the administration (and really, his aides said much more and far worse things in the story than he did). Basically, he got fired for being a bad media manager, for letting a political pissing match slip into public view. What’s more, it’s not even a new pissing match. It’s hard to imagine the president and his team were unaware of the general’s opinions of certain members of the administration before this report, so the administration was obviously willing to more or less let such clashes go … until they spilled into public view.

Though the firing was necessary since those remarks painted the president into a corner publicly, I wish it was done for better reasons than what basically amounted to a few tabloid moments by people in high places. Considering the reason McChrystal was fired, it doesn’t seem likely any of the real concerns about the war effort raised in the Rolling Stone story will be addressed (and Hastings himself said as much in this interview). And it’s a shame that the story has so far managed to primarily incite only a national “OMG, he said what?!” response. I can only hope that the attention surrounding this story will eventually shift to its more worthwhile components.

Related Thoughts

The Rolling Stone Headline

After reading the story, I couldn’t help but be a bit ticked about Rolling Stone’s headline on the story:

The Runaway General

Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

For one thing, that subhead says pretty much the opposite of what the story says. If anything, the story conveys the idea that McChrystal has been struggling to seize control of the war and in fact is having problems convincing even his own camp that what he’s doing is the right path. And then the “the real enemy: The wimps in the White House” part just strikes me as being sensational.

The Reporter’s Reaction

I also found Hastings’ reactions to the responses to his piece interesting. In the MSNBC interview above, he said he really didn’t expect the general to lose his job over the story. Also, in an NPR interview, he seems to get agitated when the NPR anchor asked him whether the general admonished his staff when they were making fun of the vice president (you have to listen to the audio clip to get the full effect):

NORRIS: When that joke was made, did McChrystal admonish that aide in any way? Or did he go with the flow?

Mr. HASTINGS: No, they were laughing. Have you hung out with the military much?

NORRIS: I certainly haven’t spent the kind of time that you have spent with the military. In that statement, I guess…

Mr. HASTINGS: I know. I mean, these guys – that’s who these guys are. That’s why I’m so shocked. These guys have been living these wars for the last nine years, you know? They don’t see their families. They hang out with a bunch of other guys and then, you know? You know, they’re in fights. They lose their people they love. I mean, they (unintelligible) some of this humor.

The “(unintelligible)” part in the transcript actually says “it’s a release valve, some of this humor.” Hastings certainly doesn’t seem surprised that the general and his aides make such remarks among themselves and seems to be almost defending them a bit by pointing to the stress they are under. Between this and the MSNBC interview, it seems that Hastings assigned less significance to those remarks than seemingly everyone else has.

Reporters and Access

The story has also sparked a discussion about reporters and access to sources. Many have argued that beat reporters would not have written about the inflammatory remarks because they want to preserve future access to the sources, whereas Hastings, a freelancer, has no such concerns. I think there’s certainly a level of truth to that sentiment. However, I would point out that even as a freelancer, Hastings would not have been able to gather the inflammatory part of his story in the first place without — that’s right — access.

The issue here isn’t whether the desire for access is bad. Much of journalism, no matter who’s doing it, depends on access, on sources being willing to engage the reporter on some level. Preserving access isn’t a yes or no issue, but rather a balancing act — how do you balance future access to a source against reporting everything you encounter through the access you currently have? The guiding principle isn’t so much “Don’t write anything bad about a source so you can keep access,” but more like “Is this story important enough to burn this bridge?” Consider what Hastings himself wrote in this GQ piece about covering the 2008 elections:

The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You’re probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you “build trust,” which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you’re supposed to fuck them over; and they’ll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art. Write this fluff piece now; we’ll give you something good later. No, don’t write it this way, write it that way. We’ll give you something good later.

“If the time comes,” and in this case, Hastings obviously believed it was important enough for him to burn this particular bridge (and as Rachel Maddow said in this segment, other reporters would, too).

As some have pointed out, the fallout from the Rolling Stone story likely will mean less access for reporters in the future. I think that’s an accurate assessment. Jon Stewart, in lampooning some of the media’s reaction to the story and how it affects future access, said of access, “I don’t need it anymore. I got this amazing story.” Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of what will you do when you need access to help you nail down that next amazing story. And while we may feel the temptation to say, “A good journalist can get that without access,” consider that had Hastings not been allowed to follow McChrystal around for a month, the general would most likely still have a job right now. The concern going forward isn’t whether Hastings has ruined it for hacks who coddle their sources to curry favor, but rather how much more difficult will things be for the next Michael Hastings as officials clamp up even more after seeing what happened to McChrystal. This is something that will affect all journalists, whether they are beat reporters or freelancers.

So was this a worthwhile tradeoff? I’m ambivalent on that question. On one hand, his story has certainly generated a huge response and led to big changes. On the other hand, the response and the changes more or less missed the more important points the article was trying to convey. I do think Hastings has written a good story, but I don’t think the things for which he burned potential future access were the best part of his article. In fact, he may have burned his bridge to write about the aspect of the story that ended up making the biggest splash, but in making that splash, that aspect also seems to have pulled attention away from the more crucial issues he was trying to shine a light on.