Some things that you should learn during media training:
- Don’t criticize your boss in a public forum…
- …especially when that public forum is a high-circulation magazine likeRolling Stone…
- …and your boss happens to be the President of the United States
General Stanley McChrystal must have skipped this part of the media training course. It didn’t work out well for him.
Politics and war strategy aside, what on earth went on here? How the heck did the general’s media team allow him to talk so stupidly candidly about the most powerful person on the planet? Surely someone there should have been keeping a closer eye on the reporter during the interview, and keeping their client somewhat more on track. It seems as though it may have been a case of “loose lips sinking ships.”
According to MSNBC, the reporter ended up on a longer-than-planned stay with the general, due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland. As part of this, the team all spent a long bus ride together, from Paris to Berlin, during which time McChrystal and his team were drinking “the whole way.” It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that the reporter saw this as the perfect time to get candid feedback from the general.
Although this may seem a little backhanded by the reporter, Michael Hastings, he was just doing his job. Unfortunately, he’s the only one in this affair who was doing so. McChrystal’s (former) staffer, Duncan Boothby, should have had a much tighter rein on the general, and not allowed any off-the-cuff comments to occur. So what if everyone else was drinking? When a reporter is by your client’s side with a tape recorder, you MUST stay close. On top of that, what was he doing during the rest of the time Hastings was embedded with the general?
The other obvious culprit here is McChrystal himself. A four-star general with over 30 years of service and many media briefings under his belt, he should surely have known the risks of what he was doing. It’s not like he wasn’t aware of Hastings’ presence. Nor was it simply a case of single comment that was wrongly interpreted. Unless this was some concerted effort to have himself fired in a very public forum, it can really be viewed as nothing less than a colossal and sustained lack of judgment. Sadly, it cost two people their careers.
