Trickle Up & The McChrystal Saga
I’ve been saying it for years… and while some old media pays lip service, few have heeded the warning.
Entertainment Media is a canary in the overall media coal mine. We are the least carefully edited, most news content dubious, too close to the talent group in virtually any newsroom. But if you look away when the entertainment media goes rogue, it will eventually trickle up to “real” journalism.
And so it did with the Rolling Stone story on General McChrystal and his aides.
I have gone on about this before, but another twist in the tale was examined by David Carr in the New York Times today. It seems that didn’t print their magazine or post the story to the web fast enough for everyone. So a preview pdf of the magazine was passed around, beyond the intended group, and eventually published by Time.com and Politico.
Carr quotes:
Several commentators suggested that Rolling Stone brought this on itself by not immediately publishing the McChrystal article on its own site (the magazine had planned to publish online but on its own schedule).
“
I don’t think this about Rolling Stone not putting on their site. It’s about them not keeping it close to the vest until the issue was out.. They probably lost a lot of sales not having the issue ready when the story broke. It’s possible the military leaked it to kill their sales. People leaked stories like this all the time pre internet.
Either way they mismanaged it. Or they fumbled it. And when you fumble, anyone can pick up the ball.
What did the Obama administration expect would happen? They knew that the story was coming out! Isn’t the first rule of PR that you leak the story first, and the first rule of politics that you try to discredit the source first?
As for stealing content-agreed that it was bogus that they pulled the trigger first based on Rolling Stone’s reporting, but Rolling Stone should also have known that anyone who got wind of that story was either going to do their own reporting ASAP, or steal it.