What Howard Kurtz & Lara Logan Left Out

So Michael Hastings, the guy who wrote the now-famous Rolling Stone article about Stan McChrystal, was just on Howard Kurtz's CNN show (via Glenn Greenwald). Kurtz brought up this:

KURTZ: [Y]ou wrote a piece for "GQ" magazine about a different kind of embedding, being embedded with the presidential campaign. And you said, "You pretend to be friendly and non-threatening. And over time you build trust, which everyone knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editors calls for it, you're supposed to (EXPLETIVE DELETED) them over."

This infuriated Lara Logan of CBS, who I understand just celebrated her sixth birthday:

LOGAN: There is an element of trust. And what I find is the most telling thing about what Michael Hastings said in your interview is that he talked about his manner as pretending to build an illusion of trust and, you know, he's laid out there what his game is. That is exactly the kind of damaging type of attitude that makes it difficult for reporters who are genuine about what they do, who don't -- I don't go around in my personal life pretending to be one thing and then being something else. I mean, I find it egregious that anyone would do that in their professional life.

But here's what Michael Hastings actually wrote in the GQ article that Howard Kurtz mentioned:

The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You’re probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you “build trust,” which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you’re supposed to fuck them over; and they’ll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art.

So both Kurtz and Logan left out the most obvious aspect of this (genuinely gross) relationship between reporters and politicians: they're both trying to manipulate each other. It's not the case that politicians—or generals, who are most definitely politicians—are poor babes in the woods, ruthlessly taken advantage of by the Machiavellian journalists. They're trying to screw the journalists just as hard.

It may seem amazing that Lara Logan doesn't understand this, and believes Stan McChrystal & co. are her good buddies and just spend time with her because she's so neat. But it would be cruel to tell her. She'll figure it out for herself next fall in first grade.

—Jonathan Schwarz