A tough look at McChrystal was long overdue

Was Michael Hastings’s superb piece about General Stanley McChrystal an indictment of the way the mainstream media had covered the general before that?

This could only be treated as a serious question by the many sages living inside the beltway. To every serious person living everywhere else, the answer was stunningly obvious: Hastings hadn’t indicted his MSM colleagues--he had humiliated them.

 

As FCP first pointed out last October, virtually every profile of McChrystal had either sharply downplayed the defects in his CV or ignored them altogether, including the general’s central role in the cover up of the killing of former football star Pat Tillman by friendly fire.

 

Asked about this by the Senate Armed Services Committee, McChrystal said that those involved with the Tillman cover-up "just didn’t line things up right," adding that "it was not intentional...I didn’t see any activities by anyone to deceive." 

 

Pat Tillman’s father violently disagreed:

 

Then there was the problem of the involvement of McChrystal’s troops in torture on a base outside Baghdad, which was festooned with signs reading  reading "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL," which the Times reported were supposed to mean, “If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it”–and where officers routinely wore no nameplates, just in case some over-zealous prosecutor tried to identify them later on.
 

But when McChrystal was chosen to be the new commander in Afghanistan, the Times ran a worshipful profile of him, describing the Tillman incident as "one blot on his otherwise impressive military record"--and then made no mention at all of the involvement of McChrystal’s men in torture.
 

On the other hand, it did quote a retired general who said that the new commander was "lanky, smart, tough, a sneaky stealth soldier" who has "all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect."
 

Subsequently, the normally excellent Dexter Filkins did another puff piece  about the general in The New York Times Magazine, in which he so sharply downplayed the Tillman incident and the involvement of the general’s troops in torture that FCP wrote him a lengthy e-mail querying him about all the things he had left out of his article to make the General look better.

Filkins never replied.
 

 And just two weeks after that, David Martin did a 12 minute and 43 second profile of the general for 60 Minutes, which did not include a single sentence of criticism–much less a mention of Tillman or torture.  Martin did, however, make these hard-hitting observations: 

The problem is that nearly all of these pieces are written by reporters on the Pentagon beat, who know from experience that anything resembling a tough article can make it a great deal more difficult for them to do their job in the future, if their Pentagon sources decide to stop talking to them.

 

Is it possible for a reporter on the same beat for more than three decades to remain tough or even objective about the people he is supposed to be covering?
 

No, it is not.
 

But the mindset of Martin and his fellow Washington reporters was captured perfectly by the truly outlandish comments of his CBS colleague, Lara Logan, and Howard Kurtz, on CNN’s Reliable Sources last Sunday.

 

First Kurtz peppered Michael Hastings with brilliant queries like this one:

 

 

To which Hastings quite logically replied,

 

Hastings added that McChrystal had been “the subject of a series of glowing profiles... And that was a game that General McChrystal’s team played very well, that if you write us a good story, we’ll give you good access.”

 

Then Kurtz sat down with Lara Logan to explain how real Washington reporters conduct their craft:

 

 

 

 

 

Logan then proceeded to say that she was shocked--shocked!--that Hastings had engaged in the most fundamental part of a reporter’s craft: trying to ingratiate himself so that his subject might let his guard down and actually say something interesting or newsworthy:

 

 

That may be the most idiotic comment about journalism FCP has ever heard...
 

Kurtz, of course, has for many years been the most corrupt reporter in Washington, covering the press for The Washington Post, and simultaneously collecting a hefty paycheck from Time-Warner, the owner of a large chunk of his beat. As FCP has asked many times before, would The Washington Post allow its Detroit correspondent to be a paid employee of General Motors?

No, it would not.
 

Then there was Martha Raddatz, the Pentagon flak who masquerades as a Washington reporter for ABC, who, on the same night the Hastings story broke, composed yet another deep, wet kiss for McChrystal to run on World News. “Few journalists have watched General McChrystal as closely as you," Diane Sawyer gushed to Raddatz.

“If there is one word used most often to describe General McChrystal it is 'discipline,'" Raddatz said in her piece. “So it is baffling that he and his top aides would be so open with Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.” 
 

Of course it isn’t baffling at all--and it is the one thing about the mainstream media for which Hastings should be genuinely grateful. It was precisely because the General had successfully seduced everyone from Dexter Filkins to David Martin that it never occurred to him that a reporter might exist who would approach his record differently. That's why it was so easy for Hastings to get him and his aides to say so many indiscreet things about their bosses and their colleagues.
 

The great David Brooks predictably longed for the good old days before Watergate, when there was a wonderful “culture of reticence"... 
 

Finally, we come to Michael O'Hanlon, the most reliable cheerleader for war in all of the Nation's Capital--and, together with the president of Afghanistan, and his distinguished brother, one of only three public figures who argued fiercely for keeping McChrystal in his job after his obvious insubordination.

 

Writing in the Washington Post, O’Hanlon cleverly recited all of America’s recent failures  in Afghanistan--and then used them, abra kadabra, to show that we’re really winning there!

 

Charles Kiaser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of The New York Times, and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.