We write for the people
Michael Hastings and Gen. McChrystal exploded in “Rolling Stone” magazine (RS), shredding the war in Afghanistan with a story I couldn’t ignore.
Hastings, fringe freelancer, ends up embedded with McChrystal and his men for a month, emerging with a story that plunges prime time media into a frenzy.
The story confronts a steely United States general reputed to sleep merely four hours, run seven miles and eat only one meal a day, whose word is a hand of discipline, who’s unafraid to invite a reporter to a rendezvous dinner with his wife in Paris, where his “inner circle” helps celebrate their anniversary by getting sloshed and slinging dirt about the politics of war.
The story broke online before it appeared in print. President Obama summoned McChrystal from halfway around the world and the general arrived with his resignation. Obama put Gen. Petraeus in charge.
I burned my eyes scouring the Internet for the aftermath. Updated every hour and utterly myopic, I tore into the story — not even to learn more about the story, but to find somewhere in the story an explanation for my obsession.
I flirted with journalism in university. I wanted to be Burrows or Pennebaker, Cronkite or Murrow. I’d have settled for Tom Wolfe, who strained the boundaries of print journalism.
But I didn’t even exist when the United States entrusted itself to these men — everything I admired was biography until Hastings. For the first time, I’m consciously aware of watching a journalist simultaneously capture and alter politics, war and history.
Beginning to understand the story’s impression on me, I wondered: Would McChrystal accuse Hastings of inaccuracy, and would Hastings back peddle? Would RS throw the freelancer under the bus?
No. McChrystal and his men never peeped, RS staff championed Hastings, and even when Lara Logan, CBS’s chief foreign correspondent, ripped him for breaking an “unspoken agreement” not to embarrass the subject of a story, Hastings never budged.
“One of the things that happens in journalism, especially with powerful figures, is that they give journalists access in exchange for favorable coverage and future access,” Hastings told TODAY’s Matt Lauer. “That dynamic didn’t apply to me and the story I was writing, or just my general style of journalism.”
As well it shouldn’t, a sentiment Matt Taibbi blogged on RS’s Web site.
“As to this whole ‘unspoken agreement’ business,” he wrote, “Lara Logan … suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for … you do not work for the people you’re covering! The people who don’t have the resources to find out the truth … your readers/ viewers, you’re supposed to be working for them — and they’re not getting your help.”
That resolute commitment to the people burns at the center of my obsession. Because even in a small town, with small agendas, it’s important to remember who your boss is.
– Jeremiah O’Hagan
Staff Reporter
