STOCK MARKET WATCH - Thursday, 5 January 2012

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55. Exclusive Excerpt: The Operators by Michael Hastings {afghanistan}

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/exclusive-excerpt-the-operators-by-michael-hastings-20120103

***In April 2010, Rolling Stone contributing editor Michael Hastings spent a month with Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Europe and Afghanistan, reporting on a profile of the supreme commander of all NATO forces in what had become America’s longest-running war. To Hastings’ astonishment, McChrystal and staff had plenty to say about the White House and its handling of the war – none of it complimentary, much of it contemptuous, and almost all of it on the record. Hastings reported their unvarnished comments in "The Runaway General," an explosive and award-winning Rolling Stone article that unleashed a global media storm and led President Obama to order McChrystal back to Washington, where he fired the general on the spot.***

***snip

Chapter 9. "Bite Me"
April 16, 2010, Paris

The next morning, Duncan [Boothby, McChrystal's top civilian press advisor] invited me to sit in on a briefing as McChrystal prepared for a speech he was scheduled to give at the École Militaire, a French military academy. I was trying to get as much reporting done as possible. I planned to leave France on Sunday to head back to Washington, where I had a number of other interviews already scheduled.

In the hotel suite, I picked a spot across from McChrystal to lean against the wall, doing what is called fly-on-the-wall reporting. It is a technique originally pioneered and made popular by Theodore White, an American journalists who wrote the 1960 best seller, The Making of the President. In the book, White had traveled and re-created scenes from President John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign – it put the reader, as it were, inside the room, like a fly on the wall. A bug.

Usually when reporting on powerful public figures, the press advisor and I would have had a conversation that established what journalists call "ground rules," placing restrictions on what can and cannot be reported. But, as I'd already seen, McChrystal and his team followed their own freewheeling playbook. When I arrived in Paris, Duncan repeatedly dismissed the idea of ground rules, telling me it wasn’t the way the team did things. McChrystal would also tell me he wasn’t "going to tell me how to write my story." In fact, McChrystal and his staff requested to go off the record only twice during my entire time with them – requests that I honored when it came time to write my story and that I continue to honor to this day. This was great for me, an incredible opportunity for a journalist, as it gave me the freedom to report what I saw and heard.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/exclusive-excerpt-the-operators-by-michael-hastings-20120103#ixzz1iadyCoWz