Slate’s Jack Shafer asks what I often wonder: Why do people like Stanley McChrystal submit to profiles like the one in Rolling Stone that cost him his job?
For most players, there is no real reason to submit to an in-depth profile such as the one that Gen. Stanley McChrystal did for Rolling Stone, a profile that has cost him his command in Afghanistan. Was there any upside to agreeing to the profile? Had it contained none of the disparaging comments about the president, the vice president, their aides, and U.S. allies, McChrystal still wouldn’t have gained from the article’s publication. Magazine profiles don’t turn public opinion or influence Congress. They just don’t. So why bother?
Newsweek does a Q&A with Michael Hastings, the freelance writer for Rolling Stone who brought down a general this week:
One of the most vivid scenes in the stories comes when you are out with the general, his wife, and his team for a night on the town in Paris. His team is entirely forthright with you, did that surprise you?
Well, they were getting hammered, I don’t know at that moment if they were being the most forthright. Of course it was surprising. A lot of the reporting that is getting most of the attention happened right away in the first few days in Paris. So I was surprised—because they didn’t know me.
So fond is the media of Jon Stewart’s ability to take sacred cows to the abattoir, he’s become a bit of one himself. It’s rare for him to get a rough going-over of the sort that Jezebel gave him this week for the boy’s club he runs at The Daily Show.
This mentality arguably goes straight the top: The host and executive producer’s onscreen persona is lovable mensch, but one former executive on the show tells us “there’s a huge discrepancy between the Jon Stewart who goes on TV every night and the Jon Stewart who runs The Daily Show with joyless rage.”
Nicholas Carr is always trying to make us feel like big dummies whose stupidity results from an overreliance on the Internet. This week he did it for the San Francisco Chronicle:
Reading from a screen is very different from reading from a book. A book provides a shield against distraction, allowing us to focus our entire attention on an author’s narrative or argument. When text is put onto a screen, it enters what the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.” The words have to compete for our attention with links, e-mails, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, videos, ads and all the other visual stimuli that pour through our computers.
Don’t expect Breaking Media to open a Tokyo office any time soon. As The New York Times reported, Japan isn’t precisely welcoming in digital media.
No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan’s monolithic but sclerotic news media.
“Japan just wasn’t ready yet,” said JanJan’s president and founder, Ken Takeuchi, a former reformist mayor and newspaper journalist who started the site in 2003. “This is a hard place to create an alternative source of news.”
