The media as war junkies.

• Author: Whitney, Jake
• Position: 'The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan' - Book review

The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan

By Michael Hastings

Blue Rider Press. 432 pages. $27.95.

In late April 2010, Michael Hastings was holed up in the Berlin Ritz-Carlton pursuing what would become his blockbuster Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal. It was 2 a.m. and he was speaking freely with McChrystal's head of communications, Duncan Boothby. Boothby was worried. A few nights earlier, Hastings had accompanied McChrystal and his team to a Parisian bar where the group's boozing and freewheeling banter stunned Hastings; one team member even threatened to kill him if he penned an unfavorable article. Boothby, a public relations veteran who had worked in Iraq, knew the group had been recklessly cavalier in a reporter's presence. He expressed "concerns" about the episode and pleaded with Hastings to "keep our interest in mind when writing the story."

Hastings did no such thing. The ensuing article, "The Runaway General," exposed McChrystal and his men's disregard for the military's civilian leadership. By denigrating Obama's wartime strategy and dubbing the Vice President "Bite Me," the team was insubordinate enough to force McChrystal's resignation. The article won Hastings a Polk Award and a book deal, but it was not universally lauded. Many of his colleagues accused him of breaking a tacit media-military agreement by printing innocuous jokes not meant for public consumption. Dexter Filkins of The New York Times dismissed it as a case of stressed out officers blowing off steam. Lara Logan of CBS News said, "Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has."

Hastings confronts these critics in his new book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan, which Is largely based on his reporting for the McChrystal profile. It was the fear of losing access, he says, that sparked the ire of fellow correspondents. War reporters worried that if military brass viewed them as unfriendly, they would get barred from elite circles. And reporters derived "feelings of prestige" from "their proximity to power," he asserts. As a result, they were in the Pentagon's bubble.

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This "schmoozy relationship" resulted, of course, in some of the most shameful reporting of the past decade. McChrystal, who was a Pentagon spokesman in 2003, tells Hastings that the military "co-opted the media" during this period, and he points...