With his Rolling Stone article on Gen. McChrystal, Michael Hastings has become both the personification of, and spokesperson for, Real Journalism, and as a result, has provoked intense animosity from establishment-serving "reporters" everywhere. He apparently committed the gravest sin: he exposed and embarrassed rather than flattered and protected a powerful government official, and in our upside-down media culture, doing that is a sign of irresponsibility rather than fulfillment of the basic journalistic function. As Barrett Brown notes in this excellent defense, Hastings in 2008 did to the establishment media what he did to Gen. McChyrstal -- exposed what they do and how they think by writing the truth -- after he quit Newsweek (where he was the Baghdad correspondent) and wrote a damning exposé about how the media distorts war coverage. As Brown put it: "Hastings ensured that he would never be trusted by the establishment media ever again."
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