Flack's Revenge

The McChrystal Affair: Important Story or Journalistic Cheap Shot?

So was it a journalistic cheap shot, which ran in a pop culture rag and made a big deal over over "routine kvetching?" Or was it an important article for a "sophisticated audience" by a "serious-minded agenda-setter?"

However you spell it, the Rolling Stone article about General McChrystal was a big PR coup for the magazine. There's been a ton of buzz in its aftermath, and a range of views expressed by commentators and the print media.

In his excellent NY Times op ed, David Brooks says that McChrystal and company's tirade was just an example of the usual belly aching that has been going on forever when important people and big egos are involved. The difference now is that we are in a culture of exposure that thrives on this inside baseball scuttlebutt.

He writes about how a culture of reticence morphed into a culture of exposure over the past 50 years: 

...after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture... It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life... 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.

... General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House... But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

The WSJ reported yesterday about the Rolling Stone's record of breaking big stories, and the potential of the McChrystal story to give it an image lift:

Rolling Stone continues to battle perceptions that it is merely a biweekly window into popular culture, not also a serious-minded agenda-setter for a sophisticated audience... Rolling Stone has a long history of covering politics and wars dates back to its launch in 1967.

The enduring value of the McChrystal article rests in its potential to burnish the magazine's reputation as a serious journalistic enterprise. Four of Rolling Stone's seven National Magazine Awards in the past decade have been for political stories

The article also details the publication's efforts to promote the story:

The publisher gave an advanced copy of the article to the Associated Press last Monday in a commonly used tactic to generate prepublication excitement. By Monday night, the commander's comments were rumbling across the blogosphere. On Tuesday morning the article briefly appeared in full on two other sites. With the story taking off, Rolling Stone was compelled to break from its standard practice to rush the story online.

Can't We all Just Get Along, Online?

There were two excellent op eds this week, one in the NY Times and one in the WSJ, both related to how we communicate online.

David Brooks' piece Riders on the Storm describes research from years ago that hypothesized that the Internet results in polarization - a widely held view (Instead of the public square we could end up in a collection of information cocoons).

Brooks points out a new study that contradicts this theory.  According to the op ed:

The core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities... most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo news... but when they leave they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves.

[The researchers] found that the Internet is more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face communications.

In the WSJ op ed Is Internet Civility an Oxymoron, Gordon Crovitz looks at a very specific facet of how we communicate online and argues that unmoderated, anonymous comments create more noise than wisdom. 

It points out that media sites are reevaluating policies of treating all comments equally. Some sites are no longer allowing anonymous comments, or any comments at all.  Others are encouraging anonymous comments (and in one case, building an entire business model around the concept).

In an interesting twist, Gawker put in a system last year that gives preference to certain commenters based on reader and editor ranking.

Wikileaks, the New Face of Investigative Journalism?

Until recently, Wikileaks.org was a little known website that outed sensitive information about businesses and government.  The site has now achieved prominence by posting a video of a U.S. Army air assault in Baghdad that killed Reuters photographers.

In finding and publishing the video, Wikileaks has accomplished what Reuters, the Freedom of Information Act and an army of lawyers could not.

It is story that I find fascinating (despite the grisly and tragic nature of the events), because it demonstrates the power of new media to uncover facts and shape major media coverage.

It involves social media, technology,and crowdsourcing (when Wikileaks realized what they had but not could not view the encrypted video, they sent a plea for supercomputing time and assistance via Twitter), and a shadowy source.

There's even (ostensibly) PR folks involved in all this.  According to an article in the NY Times yesterday:

Today there is a core group of five full-time volunteers, according to Daniel Schmitt, a site spokesman, and there are 800 to 1,000 people whom the group can call on for expertise in areas like encryption, programming and writing news releases. 

Sounds like the start of a bad joke, doesn't it: "A programmer, encryption specialist and flack walk into a bar..."

Some may quibble (as the Times story did) over whether Wikileaks is about advocacy or journalism.  According to the article:

The site is not shy about its intent to shape media coverage, and Mr. Assange said he considered himself both a journalist and an advocate; should he be forced to choose one, he would choose advocate. WikiLeaks did not merely post the 38-minute video, it used the label “Collateral Murder” and said it depicted “indiscriminate” and “unprovoked” killing. (The Pentagon defended the killings and said no disciplinary action was taken at the time of the incident.)

My question is, Is there really much of a difference these days?

Too Light / Too Heavy in PR

One of the things I actually like about Mondays is the NY Times Business section.  The paper makes up for the lack of hard business news from the weekend by running features, with a heavy emphasis on tech and media.  Today's paper has a couple of stories on the front page of the Business section that remind me of the funny Too Light / Too Heavy commercials from Bud Light.

On the "Too Light" side of the balance sheet is an article about Apple's soon-to-be formally announced tablet (see David Carr's Media Equation story: Conjuring Up the Latest Buzz, Without a Word.) It is hard to say that Apple's marketing campaigns are too anything, except successful.  They are "light" because they get all this buzz with nary a traditional PR peep.  As Carr reports:

This Wednesday, Steven P. Jobs will step to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and unveil a shiny new machine that may or may not change the world.

In the magician’s world, that’s called “the reveal.”

And the most magical part? Even as the media and technology worlds have anticipated this announcement for months, Apple has said not word one about The Device. Reporting on the announcement has become crowdsourced, with thousands of tech and media journalists scrambling for the latest wisp and building on the reporting of others.

On the Too Heavy side of the balance sheet is the growing trend for big companies, brands and celebrities to take their fights public, even if it involves applying some tough love to their own customers and corporate sponsors.  In Corporate Antagonism Goes Public, Stephanie Clifford cites examples of cable companies and the Conan/Leno/NBC dispute.  She writes:

What’s happening, according to some observers, is a shift in how business negotiations are conducted — from closed and discreet to open and political.

“There’s a code of the past that we keep things in the boardroom and don’t go public,” said Bobby Calder, chairman of the marketing department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “What you’re seeing is, I think, a realization that you can go outside and gain some negotiating power.”

The campaigns play to populist sentiment, asking the public to do the right thing, an approach that also draws from politics. They create a public spectacle, a narrative that distills dull subjects like contract negotiations into a good-guy, bad-guy conflict — a Harvard Business School case study turns into a shootout with Liberty Valance.