too many Daves

To win your trust and show what a reasonable guy I am, it would be smart to do several manipulative things:

• Feign calm.
• Pretend that it left me something other than heartsick, nauseated, and angry to learn that Michael Hastings has won a Polk Award for the Rolling Stone magazine piece that brought down America’s top commander in Afghanistan.
• Go read Hastings’ latest story and find something nice to say about it.
• Revise or delete the more snarling parts of my 6/25/10 post about Hastings, his grasp of counterinsurgency doctrine, the utter myth of his journalistic heroism, and the joke of a process that passed for fact-checking at Rolling Stone.

Instead, I will wander away from all that and start by quoting New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright’s account of nailing down the details for last month’s “Paul Haggis Vs. the Church of Scientology”:

We sent nearly 1,000 — I think it was 971 — fact-checking queries at the very beginning of the fact-checking process. That caused a tremendous stir inside the church. Finally, in September, (chief Church of Scientology spokesman Tommy) Davis and his wife, Jessica Feshbach, and four Scientology lawyers traveled to New York and met with me and the two checkers that were on the story at the time, the head of our fact-checking department, our lawyer, and (New Yorker Editor) David Remnick. And we sat in a big conference room and spent the entire day going through what were 47 volumes that the Church of Scientology had brought in to New York to buttress their case. And it was a marathon meeting, but extremely useful to me and to the story.

Here, from a 6/22/10 talkingpointsmemo.com story, is Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana’s account of what passed for fact-checking on Hastings’ exposé about Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

“We don’t read the quotes back directly. If there’s any assertion made that’s factual in a quote, we check that independently, and we talk whenever possible with the person who said the quote to make sure they said that. We don’t let them retract the quotes,” Dana explains.

He said a Rolling Stone staffer did the fact-checking on the piece and the process was “very smooth.” Writer Michael Hastings “is a pro,” Dana says. 

“Everything was backed up. He had all his research, all his notes.”

Dana said that one incendiary section of the story in which an unnamed adviser to McChrystal says that the general “was pretty disappointed” after his first meeting with an “uncomfortable and intimidated” President Obama was checked against the transcript of Hastings’ interview with the adviser. McChrystal himself was not asked by the magazine’s fact-checker about his impression of the Obama meeting.

I’m going to hit rewind and play back that last sentence:

McChrystal himself was not asked by the magazine’s fact-checker about his impression of the Obama meeting.

As I wrote in my 6/25/10 post, here’s what that means in practice:

I was wrong to write that Hastings “seems to have left it to the fact-checkers to read the shocking quotes back to McChrystal.” Nobody, in fact, read the shocking quotes back to McChrystal. This is not about letting McChrystal “retract the quotes,” in Dana’s false-choice wording. This is about confronting McChrystal with his own supposed words. His reaction might have been even more damning.

To rewind again and spotlight another detail, Dana claimed “(if) there’s any assertion made that’s factual in a quote, we check that independently, and we talk whenever possible with the person who said the quote to make sure they said that.” The spirit of that policy would seem to demand that words such as “McChrystal thought Obama looked ‘uncomfortable and intimidated’” should not appear in print without giving McChrystal a chance to characterize what he himself thought of Obama.

Forget that there is probably fancy journalism-professor jargon for what I’m talking about here. This is just basic Golden Rule stuff. Would you want to be able to add your voice to a magazine story that was going to tell the world what you thought about your boss?

Finally, because I fear that future journalists might construe the Polk Award as an endorsement of Hastings’ journalistic heroism, I want to quote one last bit from my original post:

Hastings is simply a different kind of stenographer. … The piece could have been WAY more illuminating if Hastings had called McChrystal out, had asked him to explain why the words didn’t amount to insubordination, had asked whether he’d tolerate that kind of talk from his troops, had insisted on learning from the man himself what kind of stress or carelessness or frustration or egocentrism would lead seasoned officers to speak so harshly and unguardedly. If Hastings had done so, he might have been yelled at, might have been left behind in Paris, might NOT have been able to spend a month with McChrystal. But forget that. Forget that fast. Forget it because the hero narrative for Hastings involves us accepting the idea that he boldly, bravely didn’t care about whether his actions would cost him access.

There. I hope to never write about this again. Thank you for stomaching it. I realize this post has not shown me at my prettiest. I spent two days trying not to post this, but I needed to. Journalism matters.

The saddest truth here is that a pretty minimal effort could have turned the Rolling Stone article into unimpeachable journalism. Believe what I’ve written here or don’t. Even if you think Hastings is a hero and Rolling Stone nailed this story, please know that your journalism can be better than theirs. Make sure that it is.