Pete Nickeas

This whole Hastings / Rolling Stone / McChrystal flap is bringing about a lot of good journalism discussions.

But on Sunday, bored for about 15 minutes, I turned on CNN and heard a CBS correspondent acknowledge her “unspoken agreement” with the people she covers: she won’t “embarrass them by reporting insults and banter.”

Background… Michael Hastings’ much discussed profile of (former?) Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Here’s the excerpted transcript … … …

KURTZ: When you are out with the troops and you’re living together and sleeping together, is there an unspoken agreement –
LOGAN: Absolutely.
KURTZ: — that you’re not going to embarrass them by reporting insults and banter?
LOGAN: Yes.
KURTZ: Tell me about that.
LOGAN: Yes, absolutely. There is an element of trust.

… … …

Element of trust? I’m sorry. Maybe this is a TV thing? I don’t know. I don’t know of this “element of trust” she speaks of that gives reporters a “don’t embarrass my sources” card.

I mean, if someone tells you off the record and you say “yea, off the record,” then that stays between you. There is certainly an element of trust between sources and reporters in that regard.

Unless you establish ground rules (as suggested here by Tom Ricks), and you say / do something stupid in plain sight of a reporter,  why would that not be reported? Why SHOULD that not be reported?

To be fair, Logan continued with another point after saying “there is an element of trust.”

CONTINUING… … …

LOGAN: 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.

And, I mean, I take that to the point of, even when I plan to interview someone about something difficult, and they want to know the areas of the interview, I might not say, well, we’re going to spend the whole interview on this, but I will list that. I will list that controversial issue.
KURTZ: Because you don’t want to blindside them.
LOGAN: Because I don’t believe in that.

HERE is what she’s referencing from the earlier Hastings interview:

KURTZ: Did the rest of the media, in your view, protect General McChrystal? I mean, there are a lot of glowing profiles about this guy. “Newsweek” called him a “Jedi Warrior.” You come in. You’re not a beat reporter. You’re there to do one piece, and you gave us a very different side of the way the war is being run.
HASTINGS: Oh, I’m positive that that’s the case with General McChrystal. He was a subject of a series of glowing profiles. And there’s — this is actually an interesting journalistic point.

There’s a reason why when General McChrystal took the job, everyone writes a glowing profile of him, because then that assures access later on. And that assures better — if you ever write a favorable story, they’ll get better access later.

And that was a game General McChrystal’s team played very well, that if you get — that if you write us a good story, we’ll give you good access.

They gave unprecedented access to everybody. You know, they let — you know, debriefings. They let you hang out with them. And they try to make you feel like you’re part of the team.

But that’s an illusion. You’re really part of the team. You know?

… … …

To me, it doesn’t sound like Hastings is “pretending to build an illusion of trust.” It sounds like (from Hastings’ answer) that McChrystal was building the illusion throughout the course of these glowing profiles.

But, it is good to know that a CBS reporter dedicated to covering two wars and the ongoing deployment of hundreds of thousands of young people in support of major combat operations, has an “unspoken agreement” to not embarrass the people she covers.  Every time I see a CBS report on the war I’m going to ask myself, “I wonder what information has been left out because of this unspoken agreement not to embarrass people.”

And man I’m geeked.

First! Apologies for the lack of video and photos. More tomorrow. There will also be a blog post about this weekend …. oh man. Damn, distracted. Back to work.

I gotta say - aside from the fact that I’m using a computer with a 6 gig hard drive and some of the technical issues that were a bit difficult to navigate - getting paid to do what I love is an amazing feeling.

I didn’t write today - I think that hope kinda died when I got there and couldn’t get into my computer til about 10 and had to do a couple hours of employee training.

The other reporters on the city desk seem to have a deep understanding of their beats and it gives me a lot to live up to. Plus, they seem very open to new ideas and I don’t have to worry about turf wars or too much of that political nonsense.

Speaking of political nonsense - Illinois AG Lisa Madigan not running for governor OR Senate? CRAZY!

I guess that means everyone wanting to be her Lt. Gov. are shit-outta-luck and all those hacks afraid to run against her for Gov. or Sen. will have their choice of a race with a relatively weak field. Gov. Patrick Quinn is getting bloodied up something fierce by the legislature, so everyone’s piling on him. (More on this later … getting distracted).

Anyway, I’ve got stories in the hopper for tomorrow, took care of a lot of the back-end stuff (contact sheets, desk organization, etc) (that’s what she said) so I’m going to rock out tomorrow.

HELL YEA

The Lakers didn’t beat the Supersonics, but all in all, today was a good day.

Two stories at work, which is good. We don’t typically cover day-to-day stories of statewide importance unless there’s a local angle … so we left a lot of the Roland Burris coverage to the AP. Stuff like that, we tend to defer to the wire services.

And its even more rare that I turn two stories in a day because the boss expects us to focus on one story and make it good - call a dozen people about an issue and see what they say … and this is especially true for stories about proposed laws. There’s not a lot of spot news that we cover.

But today! Today, there was. My main story today - which we’ve planned on covering all week - changed from “Teacher union spends a ton of money on an ad campaign” to “Governor compromises on major budget proposal”. The shift from event coverage to a major news peg was actually really fun. Good times, Joe!

There was that, and there was, well, shoot. I went to grab the story from our website but it’s behind a paywall now (a totally different topic) so I can’t link to any Kankakee-specific stories anymore.

It was a story about how a couple parks in Kankakee County were given grant money to develop their open-space. A simple, eight or nine inch story with quotes from a mayor and a park district commissioner, the basics. A quick little story that will get tucked away somewhere on page three that’s extremely relevant to our community but not A1 material.

So, that’s what I did today. It’s one of those days where things were just working - the governor was answering questions if you stopped him between events, spokespersons were returning calls, and local sources were eager to talk.

Today was good. Just one of those days.

Things are slow in Springfield while lawmakers are on vacation. There even seems to be considerably less traffic on 2nd Street each night after work.

Anyway, after a couple weeks essentially removed from the daily rotation, it will be nice to feel the pressure of a deadline again.

This week it looks like I’ll be bouncing back and forth between a story about the state’s expansion of a juvenile-offender program and a few other random follow ups on stories from earlier in the session.

When lawmakers come back next week, the main items on the agenda will be reform measures, a full-blown capital plan, and revenue measures. The revenue measures are likely to be the most contentious issue, since nobody wants to raise taxes but everybody wants a capital plan.

It will be fun. And I mean that with total sincerity.

State Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Pontiac, is only in the exploratory committee stage, so he’s not technically “running for treasurer” yet.

That’s not the interesting part. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney hosted a fundraiser for Rutherford not too long ago and there have been whispers about his candidacy for weeks.

But instead of holding a press conference or shooting out a press release, Rutherford posted a video on YouTube for the initial announcement and followed up on Facebook and Twitter.

Later in the evening he sent out a standard press release. He said only one reporter contacted him prior to the release being sent out - it was because she saw the update on Facebook.

Though I haven’t been around here long, I do believe it’s the first time someone considering statewide office has made the announcement like this.

Rutherford is the first candidate to announce for Treasurer in the 2010 election. Since he has a Senate seat til 2012, if he loses he’ll still have a job.