Really, there is no other profession or trade like journalism when it comes to eating our own.
And the main course for today's meal? Rolling Stone reporter and establishment media pariah Michael Hastings...
Of course, as you all know by now, or should at any rate, Hastings got Gen. Stanley McChrystal spaced out the airlock when he reported the general's contempt for the President. Not only unprofessional on the general's part, but criminally actionable as well, per military law.
Here is where it get weird. In the aftermath of the story establishment media types like the WaPo, CBS's chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan, and David Brooks at the Gray Lady have all had paroxysms of hatred for Hastings.
Logan, apparently on CNN was so exasperated by her failure to explain her point without sounding like the utter tool she is, she blurts out at one point: "Michael Hastings has never served his country the way General McChrystal has!"
Well, say what you want, but personally I think Hastings has served his country tremendously in this regard.
What seems to be the problem these folks all have?
According to Logan and Brooks, Hastings apparently lacks the necessary deference and obsequiousness to be a real reporter at that level.
You think that's sardonic?
Here's David Brooks take in the New York Times:
The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters. Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time. And at these moments they can’t help letting you know that things would be much better if only there weren’t so many morons all around.
That's his lead, his first paragraph. You can stop there. Because in spite of his faux intellectual rambling about "people are just people," "journalism has become a blood sport" and "now politicians will all go to ground," the real essence of this column is David is worried the power players he gets to be near won't like him anymore and he won't get to go to A-list parties or ride in limos or airplanes with the rich and famous.
And at the end of the day,I think it may be more than just about professional jealously or turf protection. I would like to think that somewhere, there's a reporter or two in an office somewhere with an editor glaring at them over the cover of Rolling Stone, asking pointed questions about why some F'n hippy pop culture rag had this story before they did.
Then the denial machine goes into effect when everyone else decides that they were beaten so badly, the only thing left is to get the meta-narrative.
Remember the sad tale of Gary Webb? This was the San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter who did a tremendous job exposing how crack cocaine ended up in Los Angeles, and implicated, at least indirectly the Iran-Contra players in the story. It was well sourced, complete and a complete ass-kicking for the two major Los Angeles are papers at that time. The LA Times and OC Register.
This humiliation would not be allowed to stand and the Times and Register went on full tilt smear campaigns against Webb.
This is the kind of hackery the Washington Post and ABC News are now lobbing at Hastings. Their latest salvo has them attacking the fact checking email sent to McChrystal's staff for not asking about the quotes. And using "anonymous" sources for their own sourcing of their stories.
Since when does a news reporter have to give a person a chance to rewrite their own quotes. That's not journalism, that's PR.
Hey... I think I've discovered why the big establishment journalism shops are having such a credibility problem these days: They suck!
More to the point, Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic had this defining bit to add today:
What's been revealed is not just kvetching but an entirely dysfunctional military-political operation in Afghanistan - where the Obama operation is as much at war with itself as with al Qaeda and where McChrystal's supreme Special Forces arrogance has long been a big problem. Until now, it was not clear to me how Eikenberry and Holbrooke made matters worse. It strikes me that this is big news, and news that mainstream journalists failed to deliver.
Here's a very interesting little essay that captures a lot of what this story tells us. Money quote:
I think McChrystal and his buddies didn’t expect that Hastings would actually write down everything they said and put it into print. It’s an unfortunate staple of Beltway journalism that has bled over into war reporting that most reporters are loathe to burn their sources by writing derogatory things about them. To be blunt, most reporters are as career-obsessed as the officers they’re interviewing and they don’t want to poison the well. This is doubly true if the officer being interviewed is a four-star general. There is a simple reciprocity involved: if you want to be invited back to ride on The Boss’s helicopter, if you want continued access, you’d better not write about his soft spot for strippers and gin.
That sums up so much of Washington journalism. Which is why every expert defense reporter and every established journalist treated Stanley McChrystal as if he were God until they were scooped by a free-lancer who didn't give a shit about his Washington "reputation":
In the end it was a freelancer who didn’t give a damn about how many bridges got burned who brought the general down, a reporter who’d lost his fiancé in Baghdad in 2006 (she was a reporter, too) and who wrote an unloved memoir about it (the Times panned it) and who when I met him last year exuded the sort of undiluted hypervigilence that I have always associated with people who have untreated PTSD. (Full Disclosure: I ran into Hastings at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony last July and did two rounds with him at a local Provincetown bar, the name of which I predictably cannot recall.)
There was a time when all reporters aspired to this kind of attitude. I miss those days.
I miss those days, too. More than I care to admit.
mojo sends
