Blame Twitter? Or Blame McChrystal?
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, June 25 2010
U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal in a Department of Defense photo A theme is a emerging: General Stanley McChrystal's swift downfall got its contributions from the blurrying of the line between public and private, where authenticity, in an uber-exposed insta-culture, becomes something to be exploited by a hungry press. Almost any leaders -- in politics, in the military, as elsewhere -- is going to have bouts of complaining, goes the thinking, and making that griping central to their stories will root out all but the most scripted of people from public life. (People, like, say, Senate candidate Cliff Webb?)
The New York Time's David Brooks:
[A]fter Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances.
Then came cable, the Internet, and the profusion of media sources. Now you have outlets, shows and Web sites whose only real interest is the kvetching and inside baseball.
In other words, over the course of 50 years, what had once been considered the least important part of government became the most important. These days, the inner soap opera is the most discussed and the most fraught arena of political life.
And into this world walks Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg:
Leave aside, for now, the question of whether Obama’s (and McChrystal’s, and Petraeus’s) strategy is the best—make that the least worst—for the United States to keep pursuing. The point I want to make is that because of an explosive combination of new media and a (relatively) new kind of journalism, the bar for what constitutes intolerable insubordination is a lot lower now than it was sixty years ago.
Wired's Noah Shachtman:
Obviously, the content of the story — and the progress of the Afghan campaign, and the political environment back home — mattered more than the speed of the news. The story tapped into a lot of latent anxiety and hostility about the war in Afghanistan that hadn’t been given an outlet yet. Combine that with the 24-second news cycle, and… well, you see the results.
The piece that you can't really get away from here is that McChrystal knew that this was our post-Nixon, Internet-driven. At least, you have to imagine that a four-star general in charge of an international force during a major war would have the situation awareness about the current media environment, no? What he moaned over isn't the problem, as much as it was what should have been the knowledge that his superiors and inferiors would no doubt hear about it through print, though Twitter, through cable news, so on and so forth.
For what it's worth, while McChrystal has been much of the 2000s, or new media age, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, and other remote(ish) spots around the globe, his home base for much of it was North Carolina. And Rolling Stone has been around, and politically iconoclastic, since the late '60s.